Monday, November 2, 2009

who am I?

I am a human being. A part of a world not of my own choosing, at least when I got here I wasn't aware that I'd chosen it. I've been told differently since. Whether or not I wanted to be here or otherwise I am here alive now for a limited time only. Why should I keep going? First of all I lack the will and courage to leave and transform myself into dust. Dust doesn't have any fun as far as I can tell, but then again neither do I, dust also just is. If I were to go all zen and become enlightened I would just be too. And how is this different from death?

When I wake up in the morning I face a conclave of endless choices, most of which thankfully are filtered out by whatever is happening behind the curtain. My awareness seems to be limited to a fixed amount of inputs. I don't know the scope or plasticity of those limits, but I do know that death is one of them; its reach is universal, there is some point in every ones future where everyone stops being human. I have come to like my humanity precisely because it allows me to like and dislike things. If life went on forever I could go about exploring every single aspect of the universe, but that is not my experience, so I am required to prioritize, to make decisions. I often shrink from this necessity of being.

Part of the difficulty in deciding how to live is simply in the process itself. By this I mean that I have an idea of what a good life looks like and how I'd like to be, but the methods that I choose to use, to achieve those ends seem to often subtly pull me away from my desired aim. I hear a lot about the check box mentality and how that can alienate us from reaching the heights of a morally integrated life; why? Because we turn into pharisees? We lose sight of how to be, distracted by what steps we've chosen to get there? I don't know.

2 comments:

Pianika said...

Hi. I really like this post, probably because its philosophical. In the last paragraph are you talking about the letter vs the spirit of the law type dilemma? or something else?

Loren said...

It's probably a little bit of that. I'm not quite sure. It seems like we're always trying to set up some kind of measuring system for goodness, but in doing so we're trying to perform the impossible.