Are we simply living to die, or are we dying to live? That is the question. Life itself is but a limbo, a transition between the trauma of birth and the trauma of death. But within that transition is a collection of other transitions.
Yes, there are landmarks in life, but these landmarks are brief and we spend almost all of our time in between them, wandering around, in transition. Much like the ocean, we are never still, always moving, always in flux.
Child to adolescent, adolescent to adult, adult to elderly, elderly to dead. We’re nothing but a shade of grays, a series of lengthy and confusing transitions that no man can explain well enough. Life is the eternal snack between meals and the never-ending car ride from A to B.
Yet we strive, we strive to break this vicious cycle. We seek some kind of fulfillment, some kind of climax. However, our quest for such an end is yet another transition, an aimless roaming from emotional point to life epiphany that is just as meaningless and as pointless as the other of life’s transitions.
We seek to be there, wherever there is. We want to have arrived and no longer be caught in limbo. But there we sit, like blind men in dark rooms wondering what ends could arise from the trip.
But what if we did arrive? Wouldn’t the transition be over? Wouldn’t the very thing that life consists of be destroyed? Only death could emerge from that, perhaps not a physical but an internal death. The kind of death that leaves a corpse to walk the earth until his heart finally stops beating, the death I fear the most.
So I take a different view, I take advantage of my limbo, I use my flux and I do things along my way through the personal void. It may be an endless road trip, but the scenery is beautiful and the opportunities are limitless. Rather than seeking random off-ramps for me to find contentment, I’m always seeking to improve, to better and to further myself. Even it means forever staying the course and never pausing for rest.
But in a world full of people living to die, I’m sure to be thought mad, as are all of those who see my view. But at worst my quest, my purpose, can only be as futile as theirs and not more. I’m in no hurry to destroy my own life, no hurry to arrive at my destination because death, in all his forms, likes to disguise himself as a place to rest; A rest that first steals the soul, before taking the body.
You make take my body dear death, but you can never, ever have my soul.
