Day 281- Stability- Why Do We Long For Something That Doesn’t Exist?

Ty and I are talking today about how good humans are at tricking ourselves into thinking the way things are today is the way they will be tomorrow.  We all know, we know that things change, that things have to change, but it seems most of us don’t face it and none of us likes it.  Ty’s mother is having a very difficult time with how “quickly” Ty’s father was taken from her.  He was nearly 80 years old when he passed.  He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years prior to that.  They were married nearly 50 years. There is nothing “quick” about that, but it seems the fact that they were going to age and eventually die never occurred to my mother-in-law. And I am not picking on her.  I am using her as an example of something that is ubiquitous.  It’s as if the longing for stability, for homeostasis is built into us. But, why if it’s something we can’t have?  

In church today, the pastor mentions this longing as well.  We all know that the only constant in life is change, but for the most part we hate change. We resist change. We even deny change after it happens. The fact that we have to “practice” accepting change shows just how deep this goes. Even after something has changed, our brains are powerful enough to often times work with us to deny that it’s really happened.  

Back in the day, C.S. Lewis was my favorite author. I think I’ve read everything he wrote.  It was more than two decades ago, but I recall that he believed that if we long for something it’s an indication that thing exists.  It makes no sense for the longing to have been placed in us if there is no means of fulfilling it. So, if the things we long for don’t exist here, it’s an indication they exist in “heaven” as he would have called it.

In the language I would use today, the longing for stability is a longing for things we have back Home.  This is interesting to speculate about and to daydream about, but what we do know is we won’t have it here.  Here, clinging to what is only leads to suffering. We have to learn to let go or we will cause ourselves more pain than is necessary to make it through this place. The longing for stability is a longing we have to set aside, at least for a while.