Let's Drink The Good Wine

There's a phrase I've started saying the past couple years: "Filter your water and drink wine."

Except for I'm not talking about water, and I'm not talking about wine. Both substances are metaphors for a greater thing in life. Water is a metaphor for your body, your mind, your spirit. (We are walking water after all). Wine is a metaphor for the life we consume. Since we are water, what we consume and partake in: food, relationships, sources of money, habits of being -- we absorb them. We become these things, whether or not we want or like, if we are not taking action to filter out what's not meant to stay in our bodies and lives, it's just how we are wired. This is where you have free will and choice, it's in what you say "yes" to. It's in what you reject. It's in what you allow yourself to consume.

So why drink "wine" that gets you drunk, that guides you into unconscious self-abandoning and stupidity, when you could drink "wine" that gives you life? Metaphors aside, drink half your weight in ounces of water a day. After that, you might not even want a glass of wine. Am I hurting your brain a bit? Stick with me. There's no better example to draw this out than the miracle of Jesus turning 120~ gallons of water into wine, at a wedding in Galilee. This was his first miracle. That's a pretty loud one if you ask me. Nothing like a quiet pool-side healing of a blind man. Both miracles, one received attention by default -- with an audience you couldn't hide from. The other, received attention through word of mouth news throughout the town.

You know why I think the wine at the wedding was the first miracle? Because it alludes to the phrase: "Go big or go home." Absolutely nothing in life is enjoyable or worthwhile, if you come at it with an "it is what it is" mentality. Absolutely nothing is pleasurable or wholesome, if you apply yourself to it half-heartedly. It's easy to spread yourself too thin, in a million ways and directions so that you can "protect" your heart, your ego, your autonomy, what have you. What's worth your while more than splintering off in a bazillion directions is this: choosing to commit. Choosing to filter your water, and drink "wine". But that word, commit, is heavy. So, let's talk about the wine.

What you're committing yourself to is good “wine”. And here's a few things about good wine:

It doesn't allow you to compromise yourself. 

It's so good, you don't want to drink it all at once.

It's so good, you respect the drink, the bottle, the glass, the atmosphere you're drinking it in, and who you're drinking it with. 

It's so good that you take time and care about when you're enjoying a glass. Not at any hour of the day. Not on a drop of a whim of "I'm feeling bad". 

But I'm not talking about wine — I'm talking about the life you choose to consume. Your boundary of where you say yes, and where you say no. So if you have a choice (which you do) — which wine are you going to choose? The wine that has a wholesomeness that comes with it? The wine that requires transformation for longevity, growth, and self-evolution? Or the wine that isolates you into a dark room, forever alone in your misery? Leave your misery behind. Drink the good wine. 

Your desire for a good life does not mean you need to sacrifice yourself and everything you have to offer. If you end up in this place all this does is allow anything in, to the point of lost definition of who you are and your life. But that's not even the atrocity. The atrocity is looking back and realizing that you had a choice, every step of the way to say no to unfiltered water. The atrocity is seeing and realizing that the power was in your hands all along. The atrocity is in thinking that abandoning that power of the self was a ticket to freedom. 

Freedom is actually a very vague term, with a million different subjective definitions. What you might need freedom from or freedom in, is in your hands to achieve or receive. If you aren’t confident in that, that’s where you’re in bondage. And that’s exactly why you drink the good “wine” in the first place — to live life out of bondage — to live in freedom. 

-B