where reason surrenders, faith conquers

Call it a boon or a curse: my mind is naturally prone to rumination, to replaying events. And these are not happy events I revisit. I don't just like to ideate — I devour thoughts for breakfast, pre-breakfast, post-lunch, and midnight snacks, like a hungry, hedonistic child who is never satiated. I am that helpless glutton who wants to get rid of his mindless craving for junky thoughts and lighten up his body to aim for more life-changing pursuits. But the flavourful temptations of reflecting over a hundred things make the act of chasing blankness seem painfully bitter.

It has always amazed me how humans are endowed with this surgical capacity to think deeply, dissect those thoughts, rationalize events, and build chains of logic with causes and conclusions — and yet stand speechless before far simpler questions: why do we love? why do we lose people we cannot bear to lose? why feel joy at the mere fact of a life being born, only to wither and turn to dust years later? why live, why laugh, why suffer?

And unlike a mathematical equation that has a definite solution, these questions are never fully conclusive. They only get more complicated the more one tries to seek an answer out of them. It may not hold necessity — life cannot be simultaneously lived and also thought about intensely while doing the living. This is the terror of existential dread — a topic so widely covered by philosophers of all ages, and one warned against.

Precisely at this intersection of confusion and madness, saints have entered through the door of faith and guided others toward mental refuge. In faith, we don't just surrender our freedom to certain actions, but also allow it to author, dictate, and resolve our entire existential philosophy. It puts a full stop to the draining spirals that hinder our progress in this life. We don't just choose to live by the rules of our chosen faith — we surrender ourselves and the totality of our existence to it.And in this surrendering, there is a strange conquest. Conquest of faith over reason.