Day 22

You never get time back.

I find this difficult to fathom sometimes. While pessimistic, it is perfectly legitimate to view one's life as a countdown to death. The fact that the exact day and time of one's demise is unknown doesn't really matter, since it is a certainty nonetheless.
Perhaps all things are trivial, yes. But still, I wonder about whether my time is well spent, or wasted (or 'well wasted', as Comedy Central might have it). Speaking to this: people have their standards, and I find the most common to be:
1. Deathbed talk.
2. "Difference in the world" talk.

Will I look back on life with disappointment or satisfaction, while I am nearing death? Will I feel deep regret, or will I feel fulfillment? Who will be at my side?

Or,

Did I make a difference in the world? Have the actions of my life improved the lives of others? Has the world become a better place from my being on it?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I can't help but think that while I am on my deathbed, I'll be doing absolutely nothing but fearing death. I already fear death, as a healthy and well-off 23 year old. I fear it greatly. Every so often I stop and think about it, the whole notion of it, and I reach a startling and unexplainable emotional state; a sudden realization that some day soon I will be over (life is short, after all). I stop for a moment, and for that moment everything seems different. Objects lose meaning; everything falls away into everything else. The world becomes nothing more than a mass of valueless moving things. Then

I snap back, and move on with life as thought nothing happened. But there is a suspician I simply cannot rid my mind of.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Take a step back, and we see that life is nothing other than a continuum (read the previous entry for a bit on this). It doesn't start and stop, it has no definite end. Perhaps there is a little spirituality in this thought that even the most unspiritual of us can digest. If there is no life after death, then life is an eternity.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 58

I do fear, sometimes, that the act of pondering aloud has become a cathartic experience and nothing more . It is hard in this town to find a diversity of thought, because we've all been raised in very similar ways with the same norms, experiences, and conventions. I find that the mightiest opinions of some of the the twentysomethings I know are so damningly narrow that they cannot possibly stand to the slightest breeze of doubt. Often the biggest theory is the thinnest. Our shadows grow long and starved moments before they disappear under the sunset. The natural world has cursed us with its indifference, its vaccuum of conscience in which deeds neither good nor evil subsist. I find the urge to view our species of conscious and conscientious beings as alien. It is as though the world we inhabit was never intended for us to inhabit it. In short, this town is a box. This country, political system, individualistic ideology, humanist dogma, faux rebellion against imagined authority; it ...
Read more

Day 212

It is very true that the best people in the world at any discipline, skill, sport, instrument (etc). are never particularly well-rounded people. There should be, as my grandma mentioned over dinner last night, a competition for "well-roundedness" with international competitors. In order to win you'd have to be physically capable, perhaps musical and mathematical, moral and charitable, very learned, and so forth. And that's the interesting thing, the jacks of all trades get absolutely no attention from the peanut gallery. But on the contrary, they typically have the healthiest and happiest and most fulfilling of lives. I can't tell you how many young pianists I've met, for whom piano was the sole self-measure of pride and value. And, like all people who have themselves judged for one thing, they are utterly miserable, feeling highs and lows that appear and fade as quickly as do the passing opinions of strangers. --- On a tangent: some of the most miserable girl...
Read more

Day 168

You hear non-religious people say it all the time: "If only there was a God! That would honestly be great, if there was a supreme moral arbier in the universe looking out for my every action and running the universe with me in mind. It's really too bad there isn't." I used to say that, until I came across a few authors who vehemently claim that such a wish is, in reality, a wish for slavery. When we ask for the comfort of a god (or fantasize for it anyway) were asking for a kind of absolution that only the slave can have. And the price for that is extremely high. And still, there times when I do wish I were this sort of slave, though I no longer say so with a smile.
Read more