Constant

Whether the times are of woe or weal, one constant is there for you as a life preserver, bobbing within reach in the existential sea.  Depending on who the swimmer is, the one constant has a number of possible identities, including such tropes as God, faith, friends, even science.  You have no intention of giving bad reviews to any of these, in some ways recognizing them as useful presences in life.  You would not have listed them if any of them were, in fact, the thrust of your observation; you have had too much experience trying to build some degree of suspense or notion of intrigue into your opening paragraphs to pay off as though your intent here were nothing more than a simple declarative sentence.

The more you think about it, the more you realize the appropriateness of your choice for support and such agreeable side effects as solace, comfort, pleasure, and energetic infusions, allowing you to move through the woe without becoming further bogged or distracted by self-pity or, even worse, despair.  And of course your favored constant keeps you buoyant in times of ease and excited connection with what appears sometimes to be the entire universe in all its manifestations of beauty, challenge, and personality of apparent order.  In such times, even more so than in times of woe, it is vital for you to know that although you are of It, It is not about you; you are along as a tourist, a sightseer, an adventurer in some cases, perhaps even a docent or tour guide in others.  You are along as a friend, with some good fortune as a lover, perhaps a student, perhaps a teacher.  Your choice of path is to write about experiences real and imagined, braiding the two so that whoever reads the one or the other gets some stunning awareness of the opposite braid, thus sharing your vision, even adding to its texture.

In each of these extreme modes, you are apt to stumble into the vision that It is about you, that your actions have provoked the causes of your woe or your celebrations of success to a degree not supported by the actual outcomes themselves.  It is true that you participate, deliberate, attempt to change the directions of certain forces about you.  In equal truth, you pay some prices or reap some consequences for your actions as well as benefiting from the results or consequences of other activities.

The Universe is on occasion a matter of quid pro quo for you, but never on the exact terms you were taught to believe or had come to hope were in effect.  Sometimes there is justice, other times not.  The Universe has a grand and gifted ability to surprise you, but the Universe has seen your like before and is under no obligation to notice you much less be surprised by you.

All right; you have held off long enough before revealing your favorite constant, your life preserver, your Kon-Tiki that will transport you from woe, if not to weal, at least to some state of awareness that emphasizes the creative aspects of the human condition.

Why, of course:  curiosity--the intense, immediate desire to know something you do not yet know or to know better something you believe you already know.  Curiosity--the thing that makes you wonder about yourself until you think it, do it, imagine it, or experience it in actuality.  Curiosity--the thing that leads you from the past, into the present, eyes cast ahead on the future, where problems exist in ways curiosity can assist you in discovering circumventions, avoidance, feints, strategies.  Curiosity--the thing that can leave you with the necessary energy to move toward the next step.