ease

no concept, on its own, has a single, fixed, agreeable or disagreeable quality. i need to ask “as what” or “with what meaning” do i consider a concept.

Ease, ‘as a sort of mud’ in which i get stuck and am thus unable to move towards something else, something i feel the need to move towards’ is no longer ease but begins to be hardship. without the need to move, ease would not be such mud but an agreeable dwelling place. my experience of ease is related to my view of life.

my view of life ‘as a’ stagnant problem to be solved or a matter to be decided upon in this or that way, all at once, leads me to experience ease as sticky mud. once i find ease, i decide that this is life. i harden to whatever seems dis-ease even as my supposed ease is eating me alive inside.

but my view of life as moving, changing, a journey of sorts, made of paths i take, abandon and retake in turns, makes ease a desirable but always temporary dwelling place along a path. i seek it whenever i lose it and i leave it when it starts to morph into hardship in search of a new ease (or to recover anew an older ease ‘as ease’ and no longer as mud that i am stuck in).

with hardship there is ease is the principle that human life is contingent and hence dynamic – subject to the constant action of life-giving by another, the Life-Giver. Changes of life and of my experience of life as non-replicating signals that my life is not a self-sustaining, self-replicating constant but the constant act of a free Other. each change, such as the turning of ease into muddy/sticky hardship, is a call for me to choose to return, to move back, to turn and run to the source.

if i deny dis-ease, i am stubborn and I suffer. if i love dis-ease for its own sake, i am a liar and I suffer. If i see dis-ease as a sign, a messenger and follow it back to ease, i am a follower of the messenger.