This I Believe by Joshua Treleven

Several weeks ago I offered to you, the island community and people afar, a place on this blog for your essay called This I Believe. Here is the first one submitted. (If you are interested in writing an essay called This I Believe and then recording it, click here to read the guidelines, which come from a tradition that began in the 1950s.).

THIS I BELIEVE BY JOSHUA TRELEVEN

The title of this project speaks volumes to me as in my life I have always tried to hammer down a basic rule and guide for my beliefs to live my life with less guess work. This I have found I could never do permanently, as just when I would think I knew all the answers, I would find out that I truly knew nothing.

Life is more like a sandy beach than a solid mountain and the waves that crash are time. At low tide we feel solid and unchanging. The rules are clear and we can see for miles in either direction that all the other grains of sand also agree with our beliefs.

Things become simple for a time, and hope, luck, faith are cast aside as unneeded, for we have a solid ground to live on now.

Then high tide begins. Slowly we watch what we knew to be solid fact begin to fail for others. Worry sets in as friends, neighbors, and lovers are swept away in the wave of life that breaks all the rules we knew were facts.

We are soon left with few ways to reconcile our beliefs with the cold hard truth that the waves of high tide leave us with. We can force the truth we just had washed away onto this new reality, or what we are more inclined to do is adopt the new beliefs that seem very obvious every time the wave crashes.

There is a third option, though. It is to see the whole and to understand a tide ebbs and flows to rules we do not understand. It is our beliefs that can make the tides help or hurt us and nothing is written in stone.

It is all just sand and water ever-changing its structure. The only solid ground one can find in life is to take each tide as something new, and learn from it with an open mind. Do not judge your neighbhors as each life is the sum total of its personal experience, as well as the same ever-changing foundations you have found in your own life.

If you can see each wave as a potentially new thing, in and of itself, that may never be true again, and live your life by focusing on what you want from it, not what you believe it gives you to work with, then you will begin to find peace with creation that can be used to find some idea of something to believe in.

One thing I have found that does seem to be a solid belief to have is your home is where your heart is. You may not be able to be with your heart all the time, but you can carry your home with you in your heart no matter where you go.

Here is a second recording that Joshua set to music: