Clouds

I had a memory a few days ago of something a friend said to me once. When he did it caught me off guard, not only because it was incredibly random but because I had never before thought about what he said. “You know clouds weigh thousands of tons? They’re massive bodies of ice…but they float in the sky above our heads.”

I got a little freaked out when I thought about it. Clouds are huge and remarkably heavy…but they float, higher than any living creature can fly without the assistance of machines. While my friend looked at the marvel of condensation from a scientific standpoint and I from a more spiritual one, we were both fascinated with how clouds exist.

When I was reminded of that conversation recently, I began thinking more about how we can relate the human spirit to clouds. The reason they fascinate us is not simply physical; we wonder how anything that feels heavy could float.

I think that maybe hope is the one thing that we have to have to understand the clouds. Not hope like the way we think about hope, either. People say, “I hope the weather is good today”, “I sure hope she starts feeling better”, or “All we can do is hope,” without even thinking about what they’re saying; They use hope in place of “wish”. To hope is not to wish or will that something will happen or be a certain way that is convenient…hope is knowing in the core of one’s being that something will be.

I have hope that no matter how bad things get, they will eventually get better.

Whether life has a good or bad ending all depends on where you stop the story…so I just keep writing mine.

Hope is what really separates us from most other species; we have the ability to think beyond the present, beyond circumstance, and beyond ourselves and say, “It’s gonna be okay. Let’s just keep going.” We have that ability, and we so rarely use it. Discouragement becomes a disease when the discouraged cannot keep it in check…I of all people know that. To look up at the clouds makes me feel comforted, but not because they’re shaped like cute animals or because they’re fluffy or colorful or pretty in any way. They comfort me because they are. They are so heavy, and they just float on until they dissipate, as though without a care.

Take a minute and just think about that.

We can’t be that heavy and float on without a care…but we can float on. I think human beings get so caught up in ourselves and our lives that we never really think about anything else…about what our lives could be like if we did things differently, about other people, other places, other possibilities. We allow ourselves to become so tied down by our own worries, paranoia, and fears that we don’t respect or appreciate anything, not even our lives.

Having hope through every storm is not to be accomplished without difficulty. But it is very possible, and it is how we survive. Without hope, we are feel like nothing. With it interwoven into every facet of our lives we become nothing, and are then able to see everything. And when that happens, we realize that everything is beautiful.

When the world is beautiful, we’re become a valuable part of it, and are something once more.

I’m starting to think life is completely cyclical, only with new places and players every lifetime or so. This is a gorgeous system we live in. Enjoy is while you can; when we reach what’s beyond, we’ll never have the chances we have every day of our lives…but there will be many new ones. Maybe when we get there we’ll really understand the clouds. As for now, they’re my reminder that anything is possible under the right circumstances.