endless
For years I didn't have a single thought, or at least, none that were recorded. From all of that time, not one memory can I recall. Just an endless feeling, the way that no particular glass of water can be retrieved from an ocean. Once poured in, that water becomes indistinguishable from the rest,
sloshing and flowing until the ocean ceases to exist.
How many years exactly, I couldn't say. It wasn't all in a row. I'm talking about the spaces in between the things you remember. The spaces where your whole life becomes one moment. That's all you notice when you step back and take it all in, as much as you can. There's nothing anymore but everything, which is to say, all of it. A disorienting place where you're not sure of anything, and there's nothing to hold onto. Every experience you've ever had, no matter how small, lapping at the sides of your boat when you can float, enveloping you in an unrelenting mire when you cannot.
This feeling, more than any other, can chill us down to the depths of our souls. It scares us because it's precisely the opposite of everything we know and live for. All of our progress, accumulation, and good standing, here become both meaningless and useless. It's a reminder that in an instant we can lose it all- and that there is no barrier between then and now. Then is now, and now is both the past and the future, and all our years of accomplishments have amounted to a single step. We know this and yet we ignore it, at all costs, hoping we never have to deal with that deeper reality, that shadow cast by our brightly-lit world.
The things we do are not what we think. We have too much ego to think less of them and not enough wisdom to understand more of them. And everything has to be made into a thing, but there are no things. There is just an ocean. And we are all water.
~
2015 - 2019