Back for more...:
Of all the internet sites that have "taken off", I'm confused, and yet also glad in many ways that LJ didn't ever spontaneously erupt int something viral like facebook, or youtube. In the future, the lives of ordinary people, the masses, will be archived by blogs long since forgotten; their worries, and their hopes etched in binary code, but really...just floating out there...somewhere.
It's strange to think about time...how it passes - how we use it, how we fear it - how it consumes us. The clock is ticking - all of them - and yet, the end is the same. Time takes away; it is the lost thing we never look for. But it is, so they say, of the essence. How unfortunate to have such a fickle essence. Or what a blessing - to be able to anticipate release from the clinches of time. Sometimes, I wonder how time has changed me - and how it will change me. And sometimes, I wonder if I will ever be anything more than an organism who exists in space and time - will anything I do matter? Afterall, even if it does matter even 500 years from now, slowly, like everything else, time will eat away at it - and it will lose relevance, and meaning, and finally cease to exist...but then so will those ideas that replace them. So really, time is only a distraction. I am to be worried about time because that is the standard unit of measurement for nearly everything: everything is a function of time. Even money is the value of your time. And yet, fundamentally, my time is no more or less valuable than yours - am I not made from the same atoms that make everything else? Will my tissues not rot in the same fashion as every other organic rotting thing? And, do I not borrow and use the same kind of time everything else uses?
I got to wondering because I was thinking about happiness; the time spent worrying about how to be happy and what is happiness, when, the whole world around me is happiness. Guy Maupassant once wrote a story about a woman who pined for riches - she had no worth without it, so she felt. The irony of the story is, that her search for something greater kept her blind to what she already had. The double irony is, that when most people read it, they interpret the meaning to be the lust for material wealth as the answer to happiness, when really - anything we desperately look for will keep us from being happy. Even looking for happiness. This is not to say that life is not worth some effort - I have many problems I say I want to work on, and know by some weird experience that their solutions wont just happen. I want to be less negative - and that, for me, lately, will be an effort.
Really, all I want is to find the richness of life - not to look for it, but to notice that which envelops me already. The search for something more seems to have brought both the rise and the fall of many a person - history repeating itself in nearly every living being - ever. So, perhaps to cheat time is to live the waking life satisfied and unafraid no matter what (which, itself wouldn't need to be stated because it would be intrinsically implied in the mind of a person who was eternally satisfied).
I am nothing
I am not a thing nor an idea that will endure
I came from somehting
but that something was also nothing too
my hopes and dreams are nothing
not that I can't complete
my fears and loathing
also nothing, the nothingness of defeat
If I aspire, it is to nothing
and if I fall, it is to nothing too
nothingness is also nothing
but now is something true
It's strange to think about time...how it passes - how we use it, how we fear it - how it consumes us. The clock is ticking - all of them - and yet, the end is the same. Time takes away; it is the lost thing we never look for. But it is, so they say, of the essence. How unfortunate to have such a fickle essence. Or what a blessing - to be able to anticipate release from the clinches of time. Sometimes, I wonder how time has changed me - and how it will change me. And sometimes, I wonder if I will ever be anything more than an organism who exists in space and time - will anything I do matter? Afterall, even if it does matter even 500 years from now, slowly, like everything else, time will eat away at it - and it will lose relevance, and meaning, and finally cease to exist...but then so will those ideas that replace them. So really, time is only a distraction. I am to be worried about time because that is the standard unit of measurement for nearly everything: everything is a function of time. Even money is the value of your time. And yet, fundamentally, my time is no more or less valuable than yours - am I not made from the same atoms that make everything else? Will my tissues not rot in the same fashion as every other organic rotting thing? And, do I not borrow and use the same kind of time everything else uses?
I got to wondering because I was thinking about happiness; the time spent worrying about how to be happy and what is happiness, when, the whole world around me is happiness. Guy Maupassant once wrote a story about a woman who pined for riches - she had no worth without it, so she felt. The irony of the story is, that her search for something greater kept her blind to what she already had. The double irony is, that when most people read it, they interpret the meaning to be the lust for material wealth as the answer to happiness, when really - anything we desperately look for will keep us from being happy. Even looking for happiness. This is not to say that life is not worth some effort - I have many problems I say I want to work on, and know by some weird experience that their solutions wont just happen. I want to be less negative - and that, for me, lately, will be an effort.
Really, all I want is to find the richness of life - not to look for it, but to notice that which envelops me already. The search for something more seems to have brought both the rise and the fall of many a person - history repeating itself in nearly every living being - ever. So, perhaps to cheat time is to live the waking life satisfied and unafraid no matter what (which, itself wouldn't need to be stated because it would be intrinsically implied in the mind of a person who was eternally satisfied).
I am nothing
I am not a thing nor an idea that will endure
I came from somehting
but that something was also nothing too
my hopes and dreams are nothing
not that I can't complete
my fears and loathing
also nothing, the nothingness of defeat
If I aspire, it is to nothing
and if I fall, it is to nothing too
nothingness is also nothing
but now is something true