Saturday, January 4, 2014

Death On My Mind

Constantly.  That may sound strikingly myopic, or abnormal.  Perhaps I am indeed deranged in some fundamental way, or just wrong, deep down.

Or perhaps not.

Regardless, I do maintain what I believe in is a healthy respect for death, for darkness, for the reality and need to heed that flavor of our basic existence.

It is hard not to sound quaint or even cliched at this moment, this point, and I don't mean it in a way to evoke some weird kind of nostalgia or even any reflection whatsoever.  It is more about me getting to the basics of accuracy. I experience life with a chronic understanding of death.  It isn't bad, necessarily.  It just is. Before we get to bad, we get to what exists.  In short, I have a certain awareness of vulnerability.  I don't think it is bad, per se.  I think it is perhaps helpful.  You may think that my concurrent problem of never being able to relax, to "settle" into my life, as it were, was closely related to my chronic fatiguing ever present awareness of death.

You'd be right, possibly, but I don't exactly care because I know the more entrenched reality is that you likely care less than that.  My thoughts are almost uniquely inapplicable to you, average person, and your thoughts to me likewise.  It is truly depressing, that sort of relentless unhinged nature of modern life, but I do stare it down with as little distortion as possible.

The point is that death isn't funny, and it isn't intriguing and it certainly isn't something that can be used lightly.  It is scary.  Scary because of its permanence.  Permanence is a concept that takes some time to get used to, since it is easy to hold traction of such notions in conversation, and much harder in the waves of isolation, or even habitual every day life.  Permanence overlays lot of things, the concept of it, a nice little ancillary sub-death thought.  I believe that we make decisions that stick with us, and maybe I'm wrong, but then again, the chance that I'm right is what worries me more.



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