Ataraxia

Funny the way that when existence starts, you really do think you’re the center of the universe and you aren’t even aware of your own beginning; you’re just always moving forward. Every day you wake up, you are one day closer to waking up no more. You are born; first there is darkness and then there is light, fiercely penetrating you. Warmth becomes cold but fresh air and you take your first breath. Taking your first breath is not much different than the first time you ever smoke a cigarette. You like it, you want more, and then this substance becomes your addiction. You can't stop and eventually it kills you. No one ever really quits. Every breath you take brings you closer to your last. The noises that were muffled in the womb remain muted no more. They are loud and your very first act as a free-thinking and potentially productive member of society is an act of protest against the world around you: you scream like hell. They cut your cord between you and your mother, an act that may take years to come to fruition. Eventually you will feed, possibly by natural methods or possibly by formula, society's way of introducing preservatives, genetically enhanced nutrients, and possibly red 7, yellow 13, or some form of artificial coloring into your life. The former supposedly makes one more intelligent but the latter has the advantage of one growing up without thinking too hard about their first meal, a thought that plagued every teenage boy I knew. Contrary to Freud's thinking, most adolescents shiver at the idea of even having once been somewhere inside another human being, especially their mother.

After the lights and screams and blood and placenta and the curiosity that settles in once you calm down, the lines start to blur. You find yourself on playgrounds, learning politics, warfare, and of course lust. You may eventually find your face bound to another's, find the true meaning of love, blind yourself with a collage of pleasure and pain, define your life by generally worthless experiences, etc. As you go you may find yourself more and more confused but please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times. You may find your hand fused to the gun, the bullet representing a single point traveling in a straight line through empty space, the extension of your far reaching power. Or at least your government's. The hand may become fused to a variety of instruments. The gun, the scalpel, the syringe, the pen, the book, the bottle, the cigarette, etc. Barring fire, water, the ever present cancer, gravity, action and reaction, and of course your spouse chasing after your life insurance policy, you will become old. You will become ugly. And then you will become dead. You could very well die today. Consider it every day that you are gifted to wake up and breathe, consider it in all its forms so that when your time ceases, it will not have been for nothing. You are born and there is morning. You live and there is daylight. And then before you wanted it to come twilight falls and evening is upon you. And then night is burning but now you can see the stars so clearly and in the 24th hour, your eyes become too heavy and you fall asleep. Every day you wake up, you are one day closer to waking up no more.

We expect to wake up though, expect to go to sleep, expect to continue our existence for as long as the sun rises. I would venture that only God is as faithful as the morning sun, and that seems like shaky ground but then again, sometimes the morning may prove to be cloudy. I’m just tired. And it’s never the job that wears me out; it’s me. I wear myself out, growing so very tired of me. I remember several years ago when I first moved from the left coast, I thought I missed the desert but the truth is, I just missed the open road. It was freedom, freedom to escape wherever I came from and whatever I was. I guess I was tired of me back then and it was watching the sun rise and set over the desert that helped. The sun rises and you get the chance to be reborn. The sun sets and you get your own quiet death of sorts, the chance to untangle your psycho screwed mind, drown your worries, blow your thoughts away. It goes just beyond time and our ability to measure it and the thought of it I suppose taps into something buried deep in our collective subconscious. Like a man that looks in the mirror and turns away only to forget what he really looks like, we don’t remember any particular one thought but rather the general nature of the thing. Maybe that’s how we understand God, just the general nature of the phenomenon. It’s better that we don’t remember so well, else we’d drown ourselves in memory. If you have children, kiss them gently before they fall asleep tonight and if you have someone you truly love, tell them to rest their feet and grow old with you. I can't and I'm tired now so I'm going to sleep. If all goes well I'll wake up in the morning. If not, deuces.