March 12, 2011
-
We sing in time
The worst thing that can happen to you is that you lose yourself.
Do you ever feel like history happened quickly, but now that that it’s at the present (we’re in the modern age! just like all the other ages were) things are going slowly? All an illusion. You’ll die too, and it will have seemed just as fast to the people who will take our places in the future.
People who go on diets think they are winning at something. But they’ll die too. Everyone dies.
When I was a kid I thought the truth was all that mattered.
When I was a kid I could run anywhere I wanted.
There’s always some sacrifice you think is worth it, but it turns out not to be worth it. What could matter next to a life truly lived?
There’s something we’re supposed to be doing, some faint voice susurrating with the leaves in the wind. There’s a giant sky above these buildings, a certain angle the sun looks between the trees and houses. There are young girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalks that know nothing of Libya or what we did to Nagasaki. There’s the moment a fawn stares straight back at you. There’s the thought of your whole life from start to finish. The sight of an enormous sky of golden orange clouds. The thought of deep history, and all the lives and stories that have animated sound and time, and how amazing it is that there are humans.
There’s a perspective that realizes all the things I’ve got wrong. I wish I could have that perspective. But you can’t wish it, you can only find it by living your way to it. But our bones should ache from the tension; I want to know how to live.
Someday you’ll have a dream where you know you’re going to die, and it will seem more real than it ever does in real life. You’ll see how you order your universe; what people you think of, what it is you want to do, what it is you want to say.
But why do we wait? Why do we not always live with reality?
It’s not worth it to live just how others want.
Who are we anyways? If you didn’t expect to be a human you don’t have to pretend the social world makes sense. Which means no one has to pretend the social world makes sense. This is the first and last time you’ll ever be here.
The truth is a very specific thing. We can miss it in many more ways than we can find it. But if only once in life, in that one moment you feel the rush over your bones and everything around you comes alive, you must make one mad dash for the truth. You must think that love and death are too big for you to be quiet in life. You have to head forcefully in the direction you have always wanted to, to the world you saw as a kid. You will not be sorry for it.
It is hard to identify; it’s just a pull, a dream, the thought of the world to music, something about the air when I find myself on walks when I’m alone. It’s something I can’t get away from, maybe even a disease, an infection of the soul that drives towards a realness that illuminates everything and completes our thoughts. But if it’s a disease it’s no worse than others’ disease, the disease that pulls towards routine, control, happiness, and consistency. And it might just be true. It might just be that there is something beautiful to find, that everything will light up and make sense, that salvation is before our very souls. And if that’s true, I want to be there as it happens. If only for this life, my hope is in there being a truth.
Comments (1)
“There’s always some sacrifice you think is worth it, but it turns out not to be worth it.”
^ These words are exactly what me and my beloved are going through. I think he is sacrificing me, and although I understand his reasons, something tells me that instead of sacrificing me, both of us should work to make our relationship stronger. Because I think that when two people love each other, they can both accommodate each other’s desires and needs, in such a way that both can get what they want.