Monday, June 6, 2011

the arrival

I thought I gave up living in the future. "Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die." I don't believe in heaven anymore, so it seems that I only have death to look forward to. Before I become worm food, I might as well make the most of now. But what does that mean?

Meaning can emerge internally or it can be externally imposed , either way it is created. Why do I clean my room when it will inevitably return to its natural state of messiness? Why do I shave? Why do I deteriorate? Why do I do anything?

There is a mythical realm that exists, if only in our minds (I'm not sure if imaginal places or entities are any less valid than physical ones) where all wrongs will be righted, and the righteous will live forever in peace, harmony and eternal happiness. This is a nice goal. We tend to be goal driven creatures.

The future cannot rescue me from now. If heaven exists it'll be a nice bonus, but relying on the promise of reasonably implausible future destination is no way to live. Now is an all-encompassing thing, a place where I must perpetually live out my existence. I cannot entirely defer all present gratification in pursuit of a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

I'm not saying abandon hope all those who read this post. I'm saying that every goal I create in my mind is a pot of gold. An internal Trojan horse that will prove my undoing. I tire of imagining hallucinations when I could be smoking perfectly good pot.

There is what you do and what you do not do. Choose wisely friend. I keep waiting for the moment when I can say I've made it. I have finally arrived. That this is the endgame. Now I pray the endgame never comes, that somehow I'll live forever. Seen as that is an impossible hope, I have to settle for merely living. Living is being and doing, everything else is what other people think and what do they know?

Some more than me, others less, but I don't need a proxy for life. I sell a little piece of my integrity everyday to eat and than a little more to be like everyone else. There is no pot of gold. A rainbow is light reflecting through raindrops. Heaven doesn't exist, but I do, and if I don't keep on doing, keep on being here right now, I might as well be a figment of someone else's imagination too.

3 comments:

Paul Sunstone said...

Aren't goals a bit like tools -- useful, but only in certain circumstances, and then, only if used skillfully?

Loren said...

Indeed. Sometimes I tend toward overstatement when sharing my epiphanies, my ideas about the world that often apply very specifically to a certain situation that I might be facing. This post was a veiled and somewhat overly verbose way of saying that it's the journey not always the destination that's important.

Paul Sunstone said...

I'm running short on sleep, so I didn't pick up on your theme until you mentioned it, Loren. Sorry about that.