BitterSweetLife

Cultivating a Tendency to Turn the World on Its Head

There’s a certain delight that comes from using an object for a purpose for which it was not intended—thereby achieving a positive outcome.

For example: Turning off your alarm clock with a baseball bat. Opening the fridge with your toes. Watering flowers with your coffeepot. Pumping "iron" with your dog. There’s something rewarding about such defiant improvisation. We should all spend more time flouting the laws of accepted consumer-usage.

I've realized that I find a similar joy in defying the “laws of usage” that govern much of our lives—the ones that, with subtle subversiveness, effect morality, personality, perspective, in other words, life formation—not just how you hang up pictures. Such an exercise has benefits, believe it or not, that extend beyond self-gratifying freakiness.

Consider, for example, monotony. The default response is boredom. But a persistent lack of variety can have a tempering effect on your character when you exploit it. Perseverance, not boredom, becomes the surprising result. Kind of like using dirt on your hands to get a good grip.

Likewise, heaven. For many, the obvious "use" would be a dismissive chuckle at the expense of anyone naïve enough to "blindly believe that." To which I reply, Heaven isn’t an afterthought of this life, but a continuation. You’re laying the tracks for “your” eternity as we speak. In light of this, heaven has a variety of atypical uses, not the least of which is death-defying joy.

In a similar way, perfection (natural use: frustration and driven-ness) holds promise. And loneliness. The list could go on.

My tendency to invert common “life-usage,” for want of a better phrase, makes me wonder if there isn’t a redemptive use for the human trait we usually label “difficult” or "stubborn" and repress. Why not channel latent defiance into a really useful pastime: pitting oneself "against the world" (contra mundum) and turning it on its head?

This isn't just against-the-graininess. Rather, this conscious flaunting of appearances reaches toward something better. Not merely different, not merely counter-cultural, but better. True. This isn't rebellion for fashion's sake, but for truth's.

Such a shake-up makes sense in a world where the most obvious use for any given "object" (I use the term loosely) is seldom the right or best one. This is not to say we live on a neutered earth where everything is actually friendly and cheerful if you crane your neck at the right angle. Rather, it points up some bedrock truths of bittersweetness—that Christ is paramount, even amid suffering, and therefore beauty wracks an ugly world. Even pain has its uses. Evil is evil, but it can be exploited in spite of itself.

In such a context, where Good (God) waits in readiness to throw appearance on its ear, defiance ought to be used constructively. The world as we see it needs to be assertively re-envisioned.

We all have a "mean streak"—whether it's quiet or overt—a core of spiritual metal that, beyond a certain point, will not bend. Abused, it surfaces as ugly hate-all angst, a crisis of misdirected insurgency. What a waste. Channel "defiance" into vision and it's redeemed as contra mundum sight—which could also be known as rebellion with a cause.

Seeing life rightly takes tenacity and knock-down-drag-out perseverance. Devil-may-care verve is also needed, because you are, after all, defying an entire world that lives and dies on common "life usage." Looking past appearances and beyond the edges is a job for rebel-visionaries like Christ, and those who follow in his steps.

What we need is contra mundum vision. In the realm of rebellion, body accessories and bitter rants are child's play. Defiance could be much better employed.