The whole thing scares the shit out of me.
The pure chaos of living.
The impermanence of all life. Of everything.
We want to believe there are ways to live on. Ironically, some cannot even function enough to live without thinking more living is possible. Without the comfort of immortality. Life after death. Worldly legacy - a hook we throw out for the world to hang onto and remember us. But there are not always happy endings.
Take, for instance, the life of the man trampled to death by holiday shoppers. See his world played out on the big screen.....his birth, his parents faces, his siblings laughter and fighting - family - their pets. Where he lived. How much money they had. Fights about new sneakers. Who he made friends with. Who were his enemies. Who he crushed on, thinking about them together instead of algebraic functions. What opportunities were open to him? Which ones did he seize? What regrets did he have? Passions? In the end, who did he really love?
We know his name, his age, where he worked.
We know how he died.
And that's all we have, all that identifies him.
There's not always going to be this inspirational book-movie-adaptation. The romantically bitter sweet ending set to epic music - so powerful it seems that your soul will echo through it until the end of never - does not happen.
For most, life - from start to finish - is mundane.
It's a day to day struggle of everything on every level. Our biological impulses against our psychological values, who we are vs. who we want to be vs. who we can be.
And for all of that, we still die without even scratching the surface.
Where is the memorial for humanity?
We are a world. We are cultures, ideas, wants, needs. We are clusters of individuals who never asked anyone's permission or favor to exist. At least, no one remembers asking for this.
And if you can't remember, does it really matter?
And hence the desperate importance, and futility, of remembering - of trying to reach immortality.
Maybe all we have is comfort. All we can hope for is some type of happiness, contentment, acceptance - of our fate. Just a moment's peace. Especially the poor, the talentless, the ugly, the sick. We who are not in fashion at the moment. All we have is each other. Our unrecorded dialogue, laughter, love, drama, envy - our own little world made to be forgotten in the shadow of the better lives lived on TV.
Maybe there are just too many damn people in the world. We can't all be important. We can't all be remembered. And everything eventually fades or corrupts. Nothing and no one, by life or legacy, is permanent. "On a long enough time line........"
Do what you want for today. Don't just try to be happy. Be fulfilled. Be realized. Do everything you can't do when you're dead. Exist to the most extreme degree. Change something. Even if you light the fire just to watch it burn.
The Secret to Immortality: It Doesn't Exist.
