I’ve been reading Ecclesiastes this past week and it’s a terribly depressing book. Chapter after chapter Solomon talks about all the wonderful things in life (beauty, friends, productivity, accomplishments, legacies, etc.) only to conclude that at the end of the day it’s all completely worthless, a fruitless “chasing after the wind.”
I dare say we all arrive at a similar conclusion on a micro-scale at periodic points in our lives (you know, those moments when we realize we’ve worked really hard for something that just didn’t pan out to be everything we hoped it to be.) But if that’s a hard pill to swallow, the reverse (where most of a driven generation lives) can be even more devastating.
What I’m talking about is this: we are desperate to make our lives mean something. We experience a moment of significance only to watch it sink into a mire of desperation to preserve the moment and panic that we’ll never be able to replicate or top it.
Who can survive that way? “Radical” can’t mean firing on all cylinders 100% of the time. There’s a real life in there somewhere. I believe there’s a hybrid….that it’s possible to live real life radically….but most of us will have to grieve the reality that radical real life isn’t a perpetual mountain top.
