Post tenebras lux.
Post tenebras lux. After darkness, light.
The day I left my law firm job was a Tuesday. Starting at 10:43PM that evening, I spent five hours (3:43AM) running on an assault treadmill in the dark. No lights, except a small lamp for the camera behind me and a resilient little candle in front of me. No music. And nothing to keep me company, save the shadows and their sounds.
Why? Because I wanted to find a way to symbolically mirror the transition from a life in big law—a life that prioritized “productivity”—to a life that prioritized the cultivation of Self and soul. And the best way that I could think of was to send myself into the darkness. The place from where light springs.
In the beginning, when “darkness was over the surface of the deep,” God sent never-ending threads of illumination to the ever-expanding edges of the universe with the words “let there be light.” (Fiat Lux.)
Plato painted the path to enlightenment as one where we start in a dark cave and work, through ruthless self-examination, to lift our gaze from the shadows of ignorance to the source of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty themselves. Just as Dante, centuries later, began his quest to find the Heavenly light—the one that warms us with its glow—in a dark forest: “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wilderness, for I had wandered from the straight and true.”
The same dark forest I found myself in. The one we wander into as we neglect what we are uniquely designed to do in favor of what we think we need to do to be worthy. We leave behind the pieces of us that nobody clapped for, convinced the world could never love us unmasked. So we send ourselves away from our authentic self—our unique light—in search of love.
Until eventually we come to the realization that all that awaits us while we are away from ourselves is something less than unconditional love and something more like hollow praise. In that moment, we look around and become aware of just how far into the dark forest we’ve allowed ourselves to wander.
It is then that we start to make the trip back to ourselves. Back to the unique light that only our soul can send. Back to God.
And it, like all rays of light, starts in the dark.