No Strength In Numbness

There is no strength in numbness. Nothing in it except bleak emptiness. Yet so many people prolifically pop painkillers, or ingest other drugs, drown their sorrows in alcohol, attach themselves to devious vices so they won’t feel what’s going on.

We are human beings with feelings that need to be felt, that’s why them call them feelings. So why do we insist on not feeling? It’s not so much the numbness as it is the desire to be numb. What are we afraid of?

Feelings are messages. Our body is attempting to get our attention by kicking us from the inside and when we ignore it, the kick doesn’t go away, it gets bigger. We don’t want to hear it, so we continue to anesthetize, thinking that if we can’t hear it, we can’t feel it and we don’t have to correct it.

We are all fitted with emotions, hankerings and dreams, interspersed with bouts of highs and lows. There is so much laid out for us in the feast of life and if we are numb, we will never drink from the golden chalice or devour the delicacies of our feelings.

Throughout our lives, we will have darkness and light; we will lose ourselves, find ourselves, reinvent ourselves, go through many transformations before we find ourselves again. Our lives will be complicated, our lives will be easy.

We will do stupid things, hurtful things; we will fight when we don’t have to and give up when we should have fought. Our ego will complain that we don’t spend enough time with it. We will placate it until it pushes us further away from everyone before we send it packing. We will be revered, we will be reviled. We will have marvelous proud moments and wretched regrettable moments.

We are slaves of lust; dreams of passion, works in progress, products of our environment, results of our consciousness. We are gluttons for corporeality, vanity, hedonism, and egotism; the more we have, the more we want. The more we get, the less we have.

We are covered in a mountain of matter that doesn’t matter; buried in emotional debt and ethical bankruptcy. We are technological polyglots speaking in staccato with our heads bowed to read the text ticker tape of the future ‘technologentsia,’ bound to our hand-held devices trying to repair the disconnect but still coming up numb. And yet we still don’t know how to speak.

We need to start feeling, start thinking, then stop, look and listen to our lives. Numbness is a waking death. It is no way to live. We can survive by our ability to love and cherish the life we have. Even though it may not be something we particularly like, it was chosen for us and we have to do the best that we can. We have to do our best and never lose our ability to love.

Just say no to numbness. Wake up to yourself. Wake up to life. Wake up to your feelings. Wake up to love.

What can we do to stop numbness?