Sometimes life is a little like being in the middle of a hologram for me. The world happens around me and I participate but it seems awfully contrived at times. Like all of the characters are choreographed in a certain way and I am just a move out of sync with them all.

Am I an observer? I feel like it at times…like I am waiting for something but I don’t know what. Like watching a movie that doesn’t seem to have a plot but just wanders in a reactive cause and effect kind of way. It can be annoying and sometimes you experiment to see if you can impact the story but mostly you just wonder when the point of the current scene will be revealed.

Once when I was about five or six I was swimming in a small outdoor community wading pool when I decided to lay down because the water was just deep enough that I could submerge myself and I wanted to see the sky from beneath the surface.

It was pretty cool but there was a problem…when I decided I wanted to get up I couldn’t. I was frozen somehow and watching the shimmery images of the world and the people above wandering back and forth as if I wasn’t there. Panic set in and oxygen began to run out but still I couldn’t get up. Then, in a moment, I could and it was done with a great rushing intake of air.

Life feels like that to me sometimes. Like I am lying just beneath the waves watching the shimmery images of distant sunlit ghosts moving back and forth around me and it is fascinating and frightening and immobilizing all at the same time. I wonder if I am waiting to move…to burst forth through the surface and take that great breath again.

Don’t get me wrong I am not walking around constantly aware of this, it only rises to the surface when I stop to consider life from time to time. It is harder to do then you might think, stopping I mean. We get busy. Busy working, cleaning, playing, serving, consuming, existing…so busy that we don’t stop because stopping means having to consider and that can be a frightening exercise.

I mean there is a lot of doing and the act of stopping might cause a person to actually ask what it is they are doing it all for in the first place? Aside from Mazlo’s hierarchy of needs why are you where you are? Why do you do what you do?

Not to be morbid but it seems like it is a little like busy is a great effort at distraction to pass the time between birth and death. This cannot be a healthy thing though eh?

Now I am thinking about the (shorter) Westminster Catechism (my mind is annoying that way). I am thinking of question one – what is the chief end of man? To which the catechumen responds “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”

This sounds suspiciously like a purpose and since it involves God it is a purpose that seems to be imposed from the outside ala deus ex machina. We (people) really do not like the idea of an imposed purpose. We are not golems and of course this is not the point but it can feel that way.

One reads the question and responds with a great and hardy “BULLSHIT! I am my own person, I am my own purpose and I will not take direction from some dispassionate God who I cannot see, feel, hear, touch.”

Good for you (actually just mis-typed that and it came out God for you which seems cool and creepy all at once) and then you stumble on completely oblivious to your own paralysis which stems from a refusal to try and understand yourself for a brief moment.

It’s all fine and good to take all of your (my) feelings of “whatever the hell I am here for it certainly will not be for you (cautious upward glance) unless it is somehow for me too” and then cavalierly wander onward.

Still, if I might say, this could be a small (huge) amount of denial. Like getting a remote control airplane and despite the design committing to use it like a remote control boat. You can certainly do it and it might actually go somewhere but it won’t be up and eventually despite your stubborn desires it will simply stop working.

Maybe this great sense of aimlessness that comes in the rare quiet moments when the only person I have for company is me actually is a symptom of my own stubbornness. So what if I am made in the image of God I will walk my own way, I will lay down beneath the waters and live there. For a while.

After all why would I want to glorify? Why would I want to enjoy?

Well when you put it that way it seems a little silly. Sill why should I expend energy attempting to love God when I am the centre of my universe. Love me. I am owed this am I not?

Maybe not. Upon what arbitrary rule is my desire to be loved based? What universal law placed me in such a position? I do not like these questions because something inside me says that I may not actually be owed anything and I am not fond of this.

Then again, if I am not owed anything perhaps all that I do receive is worth that much more. In fact maybe what I receive is suddenly priceless.

I have run out of air and must rise out of the water and into my busy world again but the pause was good I think.