What is Quicksand?

Jokingly, I once said that all of my male children will be named after a combination of authors from the Romance era, and main characters from Sylvester Stallone movies. The best names I could come up with were William Butler Dredd, Samuel Taylor Cobretti, and Henry David Rambo. I know. Thoreau came after romanticism. His name just fit much too well into the formula.

I decided that Henry David Rambeau is a good pen name for me. I'm someone who lives in an era filled with individuals who are violently unaware of the past visionaries who strove to truly understand what it was to be human.

How many of us in Western culture truly know anything about ourselves? Many of us do, but so many have no idea. Look at an online dating profile. You will rarely see anything more telling than "I like to go to the beach," or "I like to have conversations." So many are just so painfully unaware of themselves. One of the many times I've had to participate in a group ice-breaker, everyone in the group was tasked to say their name, and then something about themselves. One young lady took her turn and said "My name is Emily and.... um... I don't know." Unknowingly she said more about herself than she ever could have intentionally.

For some people, maybe it is better that they never get to know themselves. What they would eventually find could be too much (or too little) for them to handle. Much like Rambo himself, struggling to understand what was going on inside of him until coming to the stark realization that he was little more than a cold killing machine.

So, what is quicksand? Well, there's quicksand everywhere. It's at your job, in your house, and in your brain. It's the ignorance in which we choose to bury ourselves. At first you don't even realize what's happening. Most don't even acknowledge that anything is wrong. The longer you stand in it, the harder it is to get out.  Once you make the realization that you're sinking, you struggle to get out and it just makes it worse. Go ahead and try to grab the rope that cable news networks threw in to save you. They're in the quicksand too. Try to climb out by grabbing those branches extended your way from the political parties, but choose carefully because their pits are even deeper and wider. I'm not going to be the bones at the bottom.