Tougher than diamonds, rich like cream

God wants me to…

I was meant to…

These sayings and ones just like them have been said a million times over, all with slight variations. People find solace in the fact that a greater power controls the ebbs and flows of their lives, and that no matter how bad it may get there is hope and faith in a greater meaning.

You wake up on a cold winters morning, getting up to go to work doesn’t excite you one bit, you’re tired, unmotivated, and scared. You see all these other people throughout your day who all look like they’ve got it together, they know what they’ve got, what they want, and they stroll around with little cares. But generally? It’s all a facade, that brave face you try putting on when you do something new, that smile you force when you’re talking to people who intimidate you, the little details you leave out of stories to make your life sound more dramatic and exciting.

In the immortal words of Kermit the Frog “It’s not easy being green”… and he was a frog.

I dearly hope that none of you reading this are struggling with being green, but the principle applies to everybody, who we are, what we are down to the absolute most fundamental aspects of life, deeper even than race, or societal influences. If even the task of being human can sometimes feel incredibly insurmountable, and we’re human beings. Should it really be so hard?

We struggle with our sense of self, and everybody finds some way to create a sense of purpose for themselves. One of the most common of these is religion, of which I am most certainly not going to start naming and shaming the differences or the specifics (well not in this blog post anyway), but it’s far from astounding that worldwide over 270 large religious groups are operating today and formed almost completely independent of eachother (that’s not including subdivisions, like the almost thirty four thousand different branches on the christianity tree).

It is in the nature of most humans to congregate in groups for protection and for reinforcement, it is also in the nature of humans to treat each other  poorly and disrupt the function of large gatherings. So a set of rules and guidelines for maintaining order are formed over time by a group of societal peers. Sure the use of deities to control the populace makes sense, fear is a powerful tool, fear of something greater than, even beyond, death. But it’s the other side that touches on what I’m discussing, the idea that belief in something greater than yourself can create a purpose in life that keeps you going from day to day, week to week, and year to year.

Destiny is something we’ve invented because we can’t stand the thought that everything is accidental.

Even people who refuse to subscribe to a religion of the masses will at some point reference greater powers in their day to day life, I’m guilty of it myself, even with something as simple as ‘Things always work out for us’ is assuming that there is an external force influencing events. We struggle so hard just trying to find a place in this world, even just trying to be ourselves, always thinking it would be better if we could be red , or yellow, or gold.

Life is a series of events, some of them low, some of them high, like a blockbuster film. The human part of it is the lack of production values. All of us will at some point experience those insane world bending highs, and those ridiculously soul crushing lows, while struggling to figure out who we are and what we’re meant to do. Keep warm through the winters of your life and be sure to enjoy the sun. Because YOU are all there is to it.

When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why
Wonder, I am green and it’ll do fine
It’s beautiful
And I think it’s what I want to be