The gift of confusion

We live as if our life should last forever. It is not so. Despite we know our mortal destiny we continue to focus on very little things, even in our religious journey. I would be curious to speak with a deceased person, so that this person, once concerned as me about things of the world, can put me in the right perspective. When we have some symptoms that make us think we may have some terrible illness, we feel lost, because we are not ready to die, very few probably are.

We think of ourselves as a profoundly rational being, but maybe it is exactly on this that lie the biggest threat. These words of Chesterton always come to mind: “Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason”. It seems to me we are all those that tend to be madmen and so, sometimes, we should bless the gift of confusion. We think we know what we are doing, maybe we don’t and we should not.