When people talk about hope and faith and higher powers with a sense of certainty, I always wonder if they remember the last crisis: the time when they were falling, tumbling without the parachute.

Did they see the purpose then? Did they have faith the story would end the way it should? Did they really feel the purpose of it all in their snapping bones and say, “I’m all right with this.”

I can tell you I am not that way right now. Unable to see beyond the lamplight of my ego, my inner self ties itself in knots looking for itself, searching for meaning for itself in a pattern of its own making.

It is stupid and useless and profoundly lonely: an exercise in self-defeat.

And even though I know this, I cannot help myself.

Why?