My dad used to say we have the attention span of a butterfly. I think that is typical of our culture today. We rush from one new ‘rage’ to another. Everyday we have a new star on the horizon. A new ‘idol’ to look up to. A new fashion to follow. We are all trying to complete the jigsaw of our lives by running around looking for pieces that will fit in somewhere, somehow. But it does not seem to work. It’s like clutching a handful of sand. Just as we think we have some semblance of control, the wind blows it all away. And we start over again.

Maybe this sounds familiar “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

Deep down we know we are incomplete! Though we like to pretend that the void doesn’t exist but we give ourselves away through our actions. We act like we have it all together…..an elaborate facade to fool other pretenders like us. Then we try to spend the rest of our lives admiring each other’s masks! But deep down we are scared that the fig leaf might slip.

Blaise Pascal wrote: “Man is so great that his greatness appears even in knowing himself to be miserable. A tree has no sense of its misery. It is true that to know we are miserable is to be miserable; but to know we are miserable is also to be great. Thus all the miseries of man prove his grandeur; they are the miseries of a dignified personage, the miseries of a dethroned monarch . . . What can this incessant craving, and this impotence of attainment mean, unless there was once a happiness belonging to man, of which only the faintest traces remain, in that void which he attempts to fill with everything within his reach?” (Pensées)

Will we ever listen to our hearts shout: “This can’t be the way it was supposed to be!”