Deep in despair, I once fell to my knees and wept...sobbed...uncontrollably. This went on for some minutes, and then the strangest thing happened.
Sometime after this strange phenomenon, I learned that it had happened to others as well.
Somewhere in the middle of my deep wracking sobs, I had begun to laugh.
I'd suddenly realized that damn, I was having a great time! A change had come over me. It was as if someone else had been revealed, someone not just beside me, but within me. Another self, if you will. Or even if you won't.
This other self told me there was indeed a way to find change. This other self was evidently smarter than me, so I listened. There was a sense of excitement, but calm, as well. As if at last someone had an answer to my long nightmarish struggle.
I don't require people. I'm a recluse, and I like it that way. And yet, I hold the door open for the one behind me, let another car into traffic. I sweep the sidewalk in front of my house. Politics is people.
The other self told me I don't have to be scared. Told me I can awake to a new morning, can capture my own fierce urgency, and that right now. But I saw that nothing seemed to go fast enough to suit me. What was my other self doing for me?
And so my recalled despair threatened to return, and how I wailed! "You call this 'change'!" I shrieked at my other self...the one who promised such lovely possibilities. The one who turned my wracking sobs into reassuring laughter.
Brilliance knows itself. Its confidence tends to dazzle. Those flitting around brilliance as a swarm of moths dancing about a candle flame...well, they never feel quite at ease, their own intelligence they nervously begin to itemize...a sort of mental laundry list. Second-guessing becomes the name of this particular game. The less-brilliant always question brilliance. Not that they are stupid mind you--they just are not at the level of brilliance. No, indeed, they can be quite bright. It's just that, well, brilliance sees more clearly. Then it enters greatness.
Greatness does not necessarily imply that everything greatness does is correct. But greatness recognizes when it makes a mistake, corrects the mistake, then moves on. It remains calm as others scatter to the winds in their despair. It is difficult to recognize greatness in the heat of battle. It often takes the perspective of history, that lens wiped relatively clean by time as we know it.
Brilliance seems odd sometimes, to those conscious enough to be aware of its presence, but not quite brilliant enough to understand how it (brilliance) works. But that's okay, because brilliance tends to attract/gather what used to be called the best and the brightest. It soon becomes the "in" thing to be smart, and smart people seem to come out of the proverbial woodwork. They have ideas, and they begin to bring those ideas to brilliance, and brilliance looks at each one, and takes the best.
But something must happen first. Something both profound and mundane. A connection must be made. A communication must exist between the despair of the masses, and the clarity of brilliance.
On my knees, peals of laughter that once had been sobs of anguish, these still dancing in my head, I gave voice to my concerns. I asked if I might have the ear of this seeming self whose brilliance I could not deny, but whose efforts on my behalf must not go unacknowledged. I said, "How can I help?"
"This need not be." --A Course In Miracles.
"Ask not what your country can do for you..." --JFK.
It is not so that we cannot see these things.
"Don't resist it." --Warren B. Newton.
Ours is to shed light.
"Dreamer, stand." --We Who Dream.
A united vision is better than a scattered blindness.
Hope is not enough, but it's better than despair.