Have you ever felt that, somehow, you didn't quite belong here? As if there had been some cosmic mishap which landed you on the wrong planet at the wrong time? I have. I've felt this way more times than I can remember. It's as if I've always had one foot in this world and one foot in some other world that I can only faintly perceive or remember, which a stubborn intuition will never allow me to wholly forget. It's a strange and disconcerting thing to feel deeply at odds and out of sync with the whole current of human affairs. After all, when we feel this way isn't the most parsimonious explanation that there's something wrong with us? That the world and humanity at large is churning along just as it ought to, while we ourselves are defective? That can't be wholly ruled out. Yet there are other possibilites.
Enter May It Be by Enya, composed as part of the soundtrack for the Lord of the Rings movies. This song has always resonated with me, because it gives an enchanting expression to the sense of feeling isolated and surrounded by darkness, and hints at an explanation for it. It begins:
May it be an evening star
Shines down upon you
May it be when darkness falls
Your heart will be true
You walk a lonely road
Oh! How far you are from home
Shrouded in darkness and quite alone, feeling that we're far from our spiritual home. The purity of our hearts threatened by the discord and degeneracy that rages on around us, threatened by the sense that we may ultimately be mistaken in our deepest intuitions. Do we betray that deep sense of knowing that something is amiss, throw our hands up in exasperation and join the masses? Or do we stay true to that fluttering flame of celestial insight which sporadically warms us and illumines the way forward?
Mornië utúlië (Darkness has come)
Believe and you will find your way
Mornië alantië (Darkness has fallen)
A promise lives within you now
May it be the shadow's call
Will fly away
May it be you journey on
To light the day
When the night is overcome
You may rise to find the sun
While it may superficially feel we don't belong in this world our intuition could be suggesting something quite different: We feel at odds and out of sync not because we don't belong here, but because we've been granted the opportunity to change things for the better, to be the tip of the spear which carves a path through the darkness into a new and better world. We belong on this Earth as much as anyone else. Not because we're content with its current state or oblivious to its problems, but because we're tasked, by our acute awareness of those problems, with transforming it.
Mind you, this is not a call to become some radical ideologue, some political braggart who seeks to remake all of society in their image. Not in the slightest. I'm suggesting, rather, that you trust your intuition, that you do not lose faith in the possibility of a finer future and a brighter day, that you unfurl and share with others both the best that is in you now and all the wondrous things you may yet become. A promise lives within you, as the song suggests. Do not mistake it for a curse. There could be no greater blunder than to waste this life you have on the assumption that it was somehow mistaken from the start. Protect and cherish that fire within you. If it seems you're enshrouded in darkness and beset by shadow on all sides, remember: It may be because you're the greatest source of light in your own little corner of the world.
Mornië utúlië (Darkness has come)
Believe and you will find your way
Mornië alantië (Darkness has fallen)
A promise lives within you now
A promise lives within you now