Waiting for the one
The day that never comes
When you stand up and feel the warmth
But the sunshine never comes, no...
I am quite certain that a great many people have had the experience, at some time or another, of thinking "If I can just... then I'll be good." Of course entering some verbiage and / or a time frame to the statement. What I've found is that these experiences just correlate a chain reaction from one If-Then to another. For example, for me, two years ago it was "If I can just get accepted to graduate school...", then "If I can make it through this semester to the break...", then "Once classes start again...", etc, etc.
What I'm starting to realize is that we've somehow allowed Hollywood, Television, and Novels to so impact our lives that we've begun to re-imagine our lives like a series of capstone endings. That is, a picture perfect, sentimental, (more or less) happy ending. And that's it, the story ends with closure and comfort. The unfortunate part is that that is not the way life works. There will always be another day, to rejoice, and another struggle to (potentially) conquer. In this sense then we are all waiting for the day when we can say to ourselves, "At last, the worst is behind me." But life is complicated, we all know that. And there is a reason fiction is dubbed such and fantasy is not reality. The very subsistence of "life" is that it is indicative of a verb... living. Phrased in the present tense and demanding active participation, however passive or pro-active those actions are is largely up to the individual. Don't pester me with opposition about time being linear or cyclic because the matter of fact is that "time lapsed" is always linear. It moves in one direction, consumption.
But that fabled, romanticized, and beloved day of relief will (in effect) never come. It may manifest itself before our very eyes, but its presence will be of short note before the next tragedy or next struggle takes center stage. I'm not very politically oriented, but just look, for example at how fast our world moves from one tragedy to another. Katrina -> Tsunami in Japan -> Hurricane Sandy -> Sandy Hook Elementary. In all of these cases there are people still suffering with the traumatic fallout of those events as our media and our attention shifts away from "Yesterday's News."
We are longing for the "warmth of the sunshine" for our hearts to be filled and our lives to be consummated. We are dredging thorough time and space on a quest to overcome fate and searching for closure to our struggle. But as life goes on, so do its pains. The sunshine may never come, or it may be the silver lining behind clouds we're failing to recognize. Either way, that doesn't stop us from continuing onward. The new struggles, the challenge of a new pursuit, the tragedy of Trauma-X or Incident-Y provide resistance to strive against.
Before anyone gets too uptight let me just say that I'm not trying to diminish the severity of anyone's suffering or belittle their hardships. What I am saying is that with time and attention to open wounds (personal, cultural, and global) we begin to realize how tedious a process it is to keep our good-faith from slipping to charms of malevolence. We will never get to see how our story ends, we don't get to write a back cover or appendix. All we are guaranteed is the proverbial "page" we're on. Chapters end and pages turn (thanks, Bob Seger). The story continues and new struggles begin as quickly as old ones are (at least perceptually) closed. Perhaps it is more apt then not say "the day that never comes" but "the day we'll never see." The point of inquiry and interest then becomes; "What will I do in the meantime?"
- Albert Camus
