31 January 2021

I was walking home from work the other day, it was dire cold, and it had snowed several times in the past few days. I was breaking trail over a long stretch of unscooped sidewalk when I came upon another man, going the opposite way; we stopped, I stepped aside to let him pass, he stepped into my trail and I stepped into his, we went out separate ways.

It occurred to me as I walked on – thinking on that briefest of chance meetings – we had never met, we never spoke or knew eachother in any way, but without thinking of one another at all, just going about our own business, we had made eachothers’ lives a bit easier. We had broken eachothers’ trail.

One would be served well, I think, to not underestimate our value to others; or the value that others have to us. Probably we are all breaking someone’s trail, and walking in some other’s footsteps ourselves.

Thanks for reading,
Mike

7 June 2020

I think it is a unique quality of higher consciousness to understand and fixate on mortality.  Even I have said “the surest thing of life is that we die”.  But it’s not, of course, the surest thing of life is that we live, over and over and over, until finally we stop.

We absolutely die one day; but we live for tens of thousands.  Some think that it is death which lends life its value or majesty; I think that it is birth in the first place, its genesis rather than its terminus – an infinitely more uncertain and fortuitous thing – that contextualizes life as a miraculous serendipity in a chaotic and unconcerned cosmos.

I still dwell on death; though it is not because I am afraid to die, but because I love and am glad to live.

Thanks for reading,
Mike

16-10-2019

I don’t believe you can create anything lasting with violence.  Violence is a destroyer.  Violence is fire to life; it consumes things, and begets further violence, until there is nothing left for it to destroy, and then it destroys itself, and there is nothing left at all, or very little.  New things can be built or grown again in what remains; but violence does not have a part in that.

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Thanks for reading,
Mike

23-9-2019

I am sleeping the long, troubled sleep of life; some day I will wake into dull nothingness, unable to remember I dreamt vividly of living.

Growing is an odd thing.  For a brief time we grow larger, stronger, faster, smarter; but soon it turns on us, and we grow weaker, slower, perhaps smarter still, or wiser, but wisdom is a knife held by the blade; it cuts us with the knowledge of our own mortality, and that of others, we learn we will lose people and things that matter to us; we learn pain, just as much as we feel it in our bones and in our flesh.

We die every day, just as much as we die ultimately at the end of our lives.  We wake differently than we laid ourselves down, we lose things – parts of ourselves – to metamorphosis and decay.  Our culture glorifies youth, strength, speed, smoothness, innocence, painlessness, ease.  It is hard to accept that these are transient, just as we are.  We enshrine an image of our past selves in nostalgia and wistfully compare our present selves to that yesterself.

It is not easy to face entropy, mortality, especially in the shadow of nostalgia.  That is what nostalgia is, a shadow cast by the past over the present.  A shadow is comfortable to sit in, but to sit in our own shadow we must grow smaller, or imagine ourselves to have been larger than we are.  I do no think we should grow smaller, even if we grow weaker, or slower, or more pained.   Maturity, I think, is knowing that you will change, that you are changed, that others will change, and accepting it.

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Thanks for reading,
Mike

1-3-2019

No one can say where our dreams go.  Maybe we lose them along the way, like anything else you set down and realize later you left behind somewhere.  Maybe, like old cats, they go off alone one day and find a quiet place to die.  Perhaps like us they live and grow and change until they don’t recognize themselves any more, and neither do we, but really they’ve been there with us all along.  Or maybe they leave us behind, and we never find them again because we busy ourselves retracing our steps to look for them, while they’re waiting up ahead beyond some unknown horizon.

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Mike

25-1-2019

It is my hope that some day someone will read something that I have written, and it will be a positive influence on them moving forward; or that it will help them to move forward with their life through a difficult time.  And further, that they might then share that thing that I have written with some peer of theirs and say “this helped me in a difficult time that is perhaps not unlike what you are going through right now” or something to that effect.

When I say that I would like to be a writer some day, that is partly what I mean.

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Thanks for reading,
Mike

16-12-2018

We are born three times.  At first in the hearts of others, then into this world, and finally within ourselves.  But we die only once.

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Mike

20-11-2018

We die whether we lived to excess, or in moderation.  We die whether our dreams were fulfilled, unfulfilled, or unpursued.  We die with or without purpose.  We die because of vice, or in spite of it.  We die similarly in virtue or iniquity.  We die.  The surest thing of life is that we die.

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Mike

22-10-2018

My coat is heavy,

soaked through with cold Autumn rain,

but I must go on

Life is tremendously hard, just being in it.  I am often depressed, dissatisfied, or restless.  I will be carelessly going about everyday, doing everyday things, when a terrible weight will settle over me.  Sometimes it will be a sadness, other times it is a nearly crippling realization of the meaninglessness of whatever occupies me; still other times it will be a more nebulous thing, indefinable, and it will be all the worse because I will not know what is wrong, only that something in me is wrong.

It seems strange, then, that I fear death.  To die is the nature of life, and if life is pain and death in sequence, one imagines the conscious being would welcome the embrace of death’s release.  Yet I do not.  I want to live, and in corollary, I want not to die.

Life is pain, and then you die, but there are pleasant things also.  There is art, and wine, and natural beauty; there is love, and good friendship; there is literature and comedy and there are games.  There are many kinds of disquiet, and they are terrible and awesome and nearly constant for many of us; but there are pleasant things also, perhaps moreso than unpleasant things;  and in my accounting, I think that the pleasant things are worth the hardness of life.

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Mike

14-10-2018

Life is pain and then you die, but at least there’s art, and games, and wine, along the way.

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Mike