Love of Life

Chesterton is the author I hate to love. His words are a beautiful lure, and the worst part is, the parts I love the most are often contiguous with the parts I most hate. He snared me with these two lines most recently:

"We must have enough reverence for all things outside us to tread fearfully on the grass; but we must also have enough disdain for all things outside us to, on occasion, spit at the stars."

"[A courageous person] must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine."

He says that a person who is loyal to his world, his birth--thankful for his very breath--is more like a patriot to life than an optimist. He is ready to 'smash the world' for the sake of itself. He is a lover of life, but a reformer of life, helping his life (and all life) to make the most of itself and reach its fullest potential--its most true self. Sounds a lot like Nietzsche's idea that life is ever striving to surpass itself.

I love this principle of change because it fuels my hopes and idealism. I fear it because it reminds me that the present is always shifting below my feet. I love life, but I must despise it staying as it is now, in this moment; and I can only summon the courage to do that by fully cherishing the moment. To truly love the past, we must leave it so that we may find it's other end in the future. "It is my sympathy with all the past that I see it abandoned" (Nietzsche).

The only way to fully experience my youth is to grow old. "From the tomb of the womb, to the womb of the tomb" (Campbell). God help me to have the courage, the understanding, the hunger to save my life by losing it (Jesus). This may not make a whole lot of sense when I get old, and that's why I'm saying it now. The life I love, the world of magic and wonder is incomplete in the present. It is always reaching, stretching, longing, yearning. The past and the future are one if we keep moving. In this strife, we are never severed from one or the other. We are never lost. This is the paradox of every story we ever loved, every adventure, every minute of life: "Where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world" (Campbell).