Fights…

Hello again. Another night, another post. It has truly become a part of my day and it feels like years of struggle are beginning to dissolve before my eyes. I still have work to do, yet I find myself better for doing. I’ve spent most of my life thinking. That makes you smart, but that does not make you accomplished.

Anyhoo, in my many wonderings of today I found myself contemplating conflict. I don’t remember exactly what grade the hierarchy of conflict was laid out to me, but I find myself thinking of the many conflicts that often persist in life. Man vs Man. Man vs. Country. Man vs. God. Man vs Self. It is not all in life is conflict, it is that as humans we are constantly conflicted. We find so much of the time that things that we feel the need to do for ourselves conflict with what the world around us prompts us to do. I want to write, but the world says that’s not a real job so I get a real job like I say I’m supposed to do. I want to live peacefully and feel dignity in my work, but I live in a country that punishes the poor and even as you move up the ladder the punishments just become lessened enough to teach you that being poor is the worst and not that a capitalist system feeds on everybody. Yes, even the wealthy. I feel that people exist so heavily in the physical aka material things that they completely erode the mental, emotional, and spiritual. We need them all fulfilled to be well. The point is there is a push to competition that puts us against the people around us and there are internal promptings that put us at odds with ourselves. We know what we want to do, but we’ve been taught to distrust our own instincts and fear our most primitive yearnings, although we often find that they are not at all harmful to anybody.

Many people like a good fight, I am not always immune. My favorite kinds of fights are when terrible people finally get their asses beat. The bully. The abuser. The predator. Just anybody who has been harmful. I love when they finally get theirs. Love some justice. Most other fighting is not for me. I have always had an aversion for conflict. Mostly because I was often in the midst of conflicts growing up and I hated it. Not to say I won’t lay hands when hands need laying. That is to say that if you ever hear that I beat somebody up, they deserved it. I don’t start with violence, but once the words aren’t enough, it’s up. But I have been moreso caught up in internal battles. While trying to establish my belief system and determine life for myself, I have been fighting on many different levels. As a Black woman in America. As a person who has often found themselves in spaces that were not quite a fit for me. As a human being in a world that many people only find interesting when there is some fighting going on, I have been fighting many overlapping battles. I’ve certainly taken some Ls, but I am still here, so there have clearly also been victories. As a person who yearns for peace, I would love nothing more to forego conflict and instead live amongst people who found means of agreement so that we can create a better world. Sounds make believe, huh?

Either way, as I continue to find more and more reasons to want to propagate good, I often wonder if we can ever stop fighting long enough to determine what else we could be doing with ourselves. I know people like to do things for the plot, but this is our lives. We may or may not get another one. Either or, it just seems like it would be better if we took the strength that we use for fighting to build. I recognized a while ago that there was going to be work no matter what. Work is transferred energy and that is the basis for life. If we do not work, we are not alive. Obviously there are people alive who do not actually do much, which seems like a waste, however, we must be doing something or we are nothing. Not in the general sense of productivity, but in being a link in the chain that makes things go. Finding and fulfilling my function has been a part of every post I have made because it truly is the all-consuming journey of my life. My hero’s journey. My call to action. Some days I feel like I barely matter and some days I feel so powerful that I scare myself. The conflict between whether to do things that I know might get me further, but would cause harm and make me miserable or continue on this moraled journey that makes things much more challenging is one that I go back and forth on almost daily.

Today, I choose to lay my sword down and do what causes no conflict. I am writing because that is what I am compelled to do. For years now, that compulsion has felt like a conflict because I could not match my desire for independence and a good quality of life with being a writer. Yet any attempts to be anything else have brought me suffering and I could never enjoy my victories in other realms. So learning to establish and move in my work as a writer is a beautiful, but difficult task that keeps me in a battle between what I am told and being pushed to assimilate to and what I know I need to do for myself. May tomorrow find another day less marred by battle and more joyous in the fulfillment of writing down the thoughts and ideas that I can never outrun or quite beat. May you find peace from battle and another reason and way to fight at the same time…