Today on the treadmill, I ran 5 km in 30 minutes and 17 seconds. For those of you not familiar with the metric system or how fat my ass is, it's quite an accomplishment.
What happens to us has so much power over how we act in the future and what we become. For starters: I've been thinking about how I learned about sex through pornography and how that might be linked to whatever I think about sex now. The point is, We may be through with the past, but the past isn't through with us.
We Christians don't have sex. Every man I know "struggles" — and now I strike that word from my vocabulary — with masturbation, but Christian unmarried couples double over in guilt from a hand on a breast. One is worse than the other, don't lie yourself. We are hypocrites, all of us. We think that the consequences are greater for having sex than living in pornographic fantasyland. So one gets a hand on the shoulder and a, "Well, I'll be praying for you about that one" and the other gets you thrown into hell. Get married early, hold it until the wedding night, and find out that your years of individual sexual deviancy have fucked you over. I'm not impressed.
We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us: I was studying today in an all-night diner and had this sudden overwhelming sense that Yoko was going to come with another man, that she was cheating on me. I watched the door all night long. No reason to feel this way at all, except that the last woman left me for another man. I used to do the same thing for my last two years in the states: every time I was in Chicago — watch doors, feel unstable in public places. Apples and oranges — two worlds apart, two entirely different people, two entirely different times of life, but the same feeling. The past isn't through with us.
Laugh at this if you want, I don't care: Conor Oberst has sung, "How grateful I was then to be part of the mystery, to love and be loved. Let's just hope that is enough." And I think that might really be the point of all this — to love and to be loved. I'm trying to decide if there needs to be God for that to make sense. I don't know, really. I'd like to think so, but the agonistic me has other plans. We'll see who wins.