To Those In Search Of Something Authentic

The search for the authentic life leads us down more roads than we have time for. Those who search for a worthwhile experience do not do so in vain, but are actively damning themselves to the hardest of paths. For those of us who interact with these people, or become these people, we must remember that the search for an authentic life will often cause the breakdown of trust in the world.

Authentic moments can be found in numerous circumstances — they can be hidden in the folds of a love’s bed, suspended in the purple sunset over the Adriatic, tucked within a note held close for years, or given to others as the greatest gift. With these intrepid journeys, our hearts must be open to forgive the pitfalls – whether they come through people or places. Trust is not an earned ideal by the untrusted, but has to be given solely from the truster to the trustee.

Those who are seeking truth in experience often feel the need to expand their horizons, filling their narrative with as much breadth as possible. When you couple this idea with the moral relativism of a soul willing to take chances, you have a recipe for emotional disaster.

So this is my call to you — the wanderer, the stalwart, the traveler, maybe not physically but in your heart — to consider forgiving those who have broken your trust, and always keep in mind to limit the casualties of your own journey. Do not minimize these for the benefit of others to the demise of your own journey, but only do so when it will not bear hinderance to your goals.

It can not be stressed enough that those who come into our lives so briefly, passing through on their own journey, often leave the biggest holes. Even after these holes become sown and even after it is in our minds to forget them, it is not so in the stars, who hold on to each moment and keep it safe until our resting minds find it again.

And it is good that they are there, for a critical reflection is often a signpost for the next steps in our’s or other’s journeys. And it is with this realization that those who seek experience must ask for forgiveness from those they injure; but know the injure is inevitable.

Examined under the relativism that permeates a learned soul, it must be held that in all agreements, neither party can be seen as entirely right, nor neither as entirely wrong. Many will consider your view and and journey as brash, insincere, and lacking empathy. Keep true to the path, and understand that though the faults of those who seek seem disastrous, those souls find themselves aligned with a virtue that is higher than the everyday.

There are those who take this alignment to prove some worth they have gained above others — this is the penultimate disease carried by seekers, second only to the original downfall of trust. And this secondary vice of souls often leads to the abandonment of the reality behind the loss of trust. If you do not appreciate and understand those souls injured by your search, your search becomes empty, with only the pretense of truth. 


So listen, tramps of experience, but do not prepare yourselves for the inevitable. Know that the trials you face will not be worth it, but are the only way to seek. Seek with humility and awareness and force, and you may find yourself touching or touched by authenticity.