Remembrance

You want logic? I'll give you some - I'll step you through its snares and fend you from the snarling beasts of irrationality. Just lend me an ear.

Anxiety, depression, feeling gloomy, feeling old, feeling hollow - we've all been there, done that. In fact, it's been done to death. Sadness is one of the easiest states of mind to slip into and carries its own special kind of solace - an escape of sorts. Like a hug from somebody long estranged. In the end, mood is governed by state of mind. Similarly, how the world is perceived is also governed by state of mind. A joke you find har-de-har-har hilarious when you're happy is dismally irritating when you're pissed off.

Take any state of mind, and call it your baseline state. Your baseline state will be where you find yourself the most. A chirpy person will be pretty happy. A pessimist will have a more negative state of mind. I think most people I know have a negative baseline state. Myself included. Yep, I'm there, shoveling shit with the rest of them.

What makes a baseline state a baseline state? Why does the mind keep returning to it? A simply principle called negative feedback. A change in state is negated by the way you think, the way you've trained your thought habits. If you're a pessimist, even if you're happy for a brief amount of time, your paranoia or insistence in seeing things in a negative way is going to get you down again mighty quickly. Back to your baseline state you go, love. Negative feedback, right there.

So now coming to the crux of this post and tying everything together. How can one achieve a peaceful state of mind, where you are one with yourself and everything, where you aren't in a constant struggle with the demon called self...where, simply put, your heart is at peace? To do this, I think you need to know that there is a constant, immutable presence for which no problem of yours is too big or too small. A presence that is always there, no matter where you are. A presence that allows you to unburden your aching shoulders of all your troubles. A presence you can escape into, instead of trying to escape into sorrow, pessimism, love, self or the bottle.

When you were a kid, that presence was likely one of your parents. Things were just peachy then, weren't they? But grown-ups need something more. Maybe because of the realization that parents are, after all, as helpless as their children. As human anyway.

And there is something more, that ultimate force of negative feedback.

An Ayat in the Quran says, Verily in the Remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest.

It says it right there. And verily, every word of the Quran rings true.

I quoted that Ayat almost a year ago on this blog. I was reminded of it by a friend's poem. And I was appalled at how my remembrance keeps failing me over and over.