Why do I feel so sentimental? It is as though there were an emotional explosion inside me, a wellspring from which life flows. These emotions bring tears to my eyes and a pain to my stomach. I feel hard hit by their strength, yet I cannot understand their cause. I guess happy memories of youth, the sole visages of my past, rifts of good times long past that are so often forgotten if only through pictures and sudden piling up of emotional trauma, unleashing forth from my inner chambers, the small, dark and hidden places that we protect our most inner thoughts.

I guess my first duty is to understand where this emotional outpouring emanated. Perhaps, if only by chance I check my MSN Place, and I found an article I posted when I entered college...Amazing how four years have passed since that day. It feels almost as if an eternity has passed. Have I truly changed that much? I cannot say. I can however remark at the depth and breath of the progression of who I have become as a person. When I left high school I had the future open to me as if by God himself. I felt as though no matter my obstacle, I would overcome.

Perhaps this is why I feel so strange. Looking back, remembering photos, people, places. The individuals. Not the real people, but the memories, those precious fragments of past time and place that determines the fundamental core of human existence. We are a soul, bound up by countless threads, emotional twine, that binds existence to itself. When we look to these threads we find ourselves, the fabric. And I find it interesting, how such pure emotion, such energy can emanate from so fundamental a source. If nothing more than human imagining, this empathetic view of existence is the downtrodden perceptions of a lonely man. One who wanders aimlessly through time and space, wondering when and where his past and future will meet, how and why his life's purpose exists, and what it is. Why in such a dim and dark life, filled with hardship and suffering, this man, this creature, could be sold into the bondage of his own heart, to be thrown back again, like a fish too small, and too weak to be caught, I am tossed back into the deep, dark and depressing existence I call my life.

Once I was told, life is not as hard as we humans make it out to be, in fact, life is precious, the most precious thing in existence. If this is true, why then is life so hard, why so painful? Is not our entire existences the continued struggle to prevent our own demise, to improve our state? How can we overcome what is not there to overcome. We are born, we live, and die. It is a cycle, never ending, that is the fundamental nature of creation. God spoke it, it will be done. Yet we ask ourselves, why does life have to be so hard?

Simple, because we make it so.

If life was really so hard, if God's will for it to be vile, painful, and filled with continual agony and torment, then would not our existences have no silver lining, no happy ending, no moment of peace to wash away the fire and dust of our day to day existence? I cannot believe this is so. Life is of our making. God has a plan, one simply has to take up their spade, his bag, her walking stick, and travel into the wilderness to seek that path. The untrodden path. The one less taken, as a wise poet once spoke. I feel that our lives are ever waining, but if human truth was ever present, if our existence, ever watchful, we would see the errors of our ways. We cannot survive alone, for to do so would be a curse worse than death, but perhaps, if we can only understand our weaknesses, our flaws, and seek to overcome them through hard work, compassion and tried understanding, life would become a simpler, happier thing. And if my solemn promise to my heart awakens, I dare think, one day, life will become that memory I witness in my dreams, a peaceful place, where hope and imagination is the core of our being, the greatest gifts we possess. Take your choice, your power of decision, and use it wisely. For it was not angels of higher being that were to be given such honor, it was of women and men. We are of the chosen place in the hierarchy of time and space. Choose you path well, for you only get the mortal place to choose. God willing, make it a good one. And chose with a balanced sword, for you must remember the blade will always cut both ways. So as you stand at the fork between endless destinies, remember, you are not the first, and will not be the last. The perfect choice will always allude you, but at least try to find it. It is in the journey to betterment, God's chosen path, that we achieve our greatest feats. To abandon the path simply for it's difficulties is a fools errand. Remember these words as your go about your day to day commitments, for I hope they will bring wisdom to your hearts and minds, as they have given me.

I wish all ye well in your adventures through this life. I hope perhaps we can speak further of our journey through this existence. God didn't make junk, so use what was given to you to its fullest, else it fade into the pages of history.

Good peoples of this world, I beg you, remember you chosen path, and walk it with peace and content on your hearts, for when this life is none, what have ye left to come home to? Life is what we make it, but what we make it is what it will become.

Truly with kindness and sincerity,

-Christopher M. Vanderwall-Brown