Staring Into The Heart of Darkness

I was talking with a lady today about various things and the conversation drifted along to where we broached the subject of life changing events. The way she put it went something like this: "People don't fundamentally change until they've truly stared into the heart of darkness." Now that's seriously paraphrased but that's basically what it boils down to, staring into the heart of darkness.

What this means is that for most people, until some catastrophic event occurs that is basically what amounts to being a near death experience for us or someone we care deeply about, we never really look at ourselves, and so don't truly know the stuff of which we are made. Sadly it's really only those types of events that forces us to look deeper into ourselves than ever before, to take stock of who we are and what we have done with our lives. To see all our faults for what they truly are: Those things in ourselves which prevent us from fulfilling our potential as good and decent members of the human race.

It's only during, and maybe shortly after, this kind of experience that the concept of staring into the heart of darkness comes into play. You see, we all have a dark side which we are all able to easily ignore, and there have been points in our life that we've managed to forget across the years in our daily living where we have let our dark side "convince" us that what we knew to be not quite right was "acceptable", and so went ahead and did that something that wasn't really acceptable regardless.

Some people have these drastic and immediate moments of clarity and realize that they must be a better person all around and the change in them is remarkable. Others miss it entirely.

At some point in time we all will have at least one of these moments. Some people will have this experience a few times. We can only hope that when those moments come we take notice of the darkness in our own lives and then adjust what we feel, think and do to better ourselves and the lives of those around us.