Reflections on Life
Wednesday, August 05, 2009 (17:57:05)

Posted by horatio

Life sure feels strange sometimes, or at least it does for me, and especially as of late.

Did you ever have the feeling that you were the captain of a vast yet desolate ship, sails at full mast, the sounds of the wind and sea raging all around you, as you plunged headlong into the darkness and fog just beyond your sight?

Or what about walking the narrow edge of a steep mountain precipice, every step a risk, as you half fearfully and half excitedly peer over the careening edge just over your shoulder and wonder how long you would fall for if you were to slip just a bit?

Or perhaps the feeling is so much bore mundane or banal--as Arendt might call it--and that very mendacity is as maddening, if not more, than anything one's mind might conjure in the last fits and throws of, say, the last quaff from a frothy glass of hemlock.

Sometimes life requires a re-evaluation. Sometimes we require a different life than the one we are leading. And sometimes life just crashes and melts like that computer hard drive you loved so much because it had all of your memories saved on it. And no matter how many times you hit reset, no matter how many disk scans you try running, no emergency boot disk will restore the damage. And so we yell and scream, and sometimes we even cry. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't. Either way it doesn't really matter, as we still get to the same place at the end of the day.

I guess in a lot of ways, it's like the old parable about traveling the mountain, and every path leading to the top. It's not the destination itself that ultimately matters, but the paths we have to walk to reach it that will ultimately define who and what we are. And in those adventures, the best story is the one we have yet to write for ourselves. So like the intrepid explorers, we too must continue to survey the landscape of our selves and probe the distant mountains of our psyche as we explore the world. And perhaps, like the capitan, we too may meet a Dersu Uzulu along the way, or have the chance for a wild tiger to cross our paths in unexplored territory.

Why is it then that the first steps on a new journey are sometimes the hardest to take?