Quod me nutrit, me destruit

It seems as though our whole lives are about losing faith and then finding it again in something or someone else.  The things that we learned as children from our parents, our teachers, our friends seem to lose their meaning as we grow older.  We examine ourselves and our beliefs and they suddenly have no relevance to the life that we are living.  So we search for something new to believe in, to give our lives meaning.

And sometimes we run away from our idea of God and from the beliefs that we grew up with only to realize later that we truly miss having that something in our lives.  We look for it in other religions, other traditions and other people.  We look within and without.  We look.  We search.  We try.  We give up and we try again.  We can't find a God that fits into our life or a religion that we can fit our lives into.  So we turn to other people.  Friends, lovers and those that fall somewhere in between.

The friends that we've lost and that we have kept are signposts that have pointed us in the right and wrong directions.  The people that we have chosen to love and/or to fuck and have left behind were steps in the journey to find and give meaning to our lives.  The people that we've let slip away, that we still long for are the stars that we look to, to reorient ourselves in our search.  And then, we realize that there's only one place to search--within ourselves.  

The people that are no longer here, well, for one reason or another, they aren't meant to be.  Not even the ones for whom we still long as we lay in bed each night.  The friends that we've left behind or that have left us behind were meant to be in our lives for the time that they were.  No longer.  Perhaps we lost a bit of ourselves in the process but we have also gained from these experiences.  And we are better for it.

So when we come to that realization, we suddenly know that there has to be something more than just other people or ourselves to believe in, to depend upon.  And the search continues.  And continues.