Recently, I read a post about accepting Jesus as your saviour.

Just so you know, although I’m not religious in any way, shape or form, from the little I’ve read, and generally heard about Jesus, he seemed like a pretty cool guy. And by cool, I mean that everything he supposedly taught, as far as I know, I quite agree with.  Love thy enemy, know thy self, let he without sin cast the first stone, seek and ye shall find, etcetera, etcetera – all top notch stuffs.  Though I’m not convinced that he did, in fact, exist, generally; leaving alone the, in my mind, undoubtedly nonsensical proposition that he was the son, and personification of God – an omnipotent interlocutor intervening in human affairs from planet Albatron –  he seemed wise, kind, and to be a pretty switched on dude for the epoch in which he lived.

The problem (one of many) I have with accepting Jesus as my saviour, however, has to do with the undertone subtly weaving into its postulation, which is this: That I somehow, in some capacity, for whatever the reason, need to be saved; a notion that unsettles me greatly (not really, I’m personally quite indifferent on the matter, but this reads more dramatically, right?)

I mean, I get it; the lives that so many of us lead, I do very much believe, are empty, and devoid of genuine love or light or joy. Especially in a society where excess, greed and selfishness are encouraged so blindly, yes, sure, I’ll concede that many of us have, at least in some regard, room to be “saved” from our rather apathetic, lacklustre, and disdainfully humdrum quotidian.

And with the emergence of such an onslaught of atrociously written self-help books, having only to do with, in most cases, improving one’s own external circumstances, it’s growing only more and more apparent that we’re collectively looking for some sort of change, for some sort of saviour, for meaning in something much bigger than ourselves.

Personally, I have, and, much like a rather brilliant lunatic explains – here, in her extraordinarily raw post: The Things I would Tell You – found my own saviour, my own “higher meaning” to come from the gift of retrospect.

Retrospect is to me, I suppose, what Jesus is to a Christian: My one, and my only, saviour.

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A lot of the time, on a moment-to-moment basis, our lives can present a lot more glumly and or drearily than they really are. Things are rarely that bad. Sure, sometimes the weather changes from sunny to overcast, and sometimes the storm’s ferocity increases ten-fold, leaving us helpless to weather its storm; however, and yes, very generally speaking, when time and space together float by, passing us in their whimsical merriment, totally indifferent to our existence, things that once were so dire, so unbearable, so agonising, are shone in a different light. And what we once were comes to surface as nothing more than a slice of our own personal fiction, a story, which we can now see with a clearer lens.

Retrospect is a vehicle through which we can, indeed, find a saviour.

You see, I’m not sure that any of us inherently need saving. I’m not so sure that we can endeavour to improve our lives, unless we by necessary equation, define that we are first lacking in some way, and so aim to stitch up a wound that we ourselves have created.

Only with the lapse of time are we able to configure our interest, mould our desires, and paint in our empty silhouettes with colours we personally find palatable.  Only in retrospect are we capable of saving certain parts of ourselves that have developed in such a way that may be self-perceptibly harming us.

So, as time has taught me: this too, shall pass, whether it is good, or bad, or somewhere in between.  And so, when it does, I’ll be waiting at the other end, hoping to scoop up and salvage whatever crumbs of wisdom are left behind, which I perceive will aid me to better truck on with this journey that is life.  And, if I’m lucky, provide me with a something capable of feeding, for the better, someone else’s.

Because I’m pretty sure that you, dear reader, are quite perfect as you are.  As ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, our existence is no more but a mere pale, blue dot, lost in an ocean of utter nothingness. Whatever our hopes, our dreams, our aches, our triumphs, we will all fall into this void of no-thing, whether we like it or not.  And knowing this fact before fate sets itself upon us – knowing that this life we think we know will one day morph into a story for us to view in the same vain we view the television – a work of retrospect, and little more – is, I truly believe, the most liberating saviour we shall ever identify.

Revealing to us the gift of knowing and feeling and seeing that life is, sure as diddly-a-rino, worth living.

Humans-are-not-inherently-broken.  We’re just a little delusional. 

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