Thursday, August 28, 2014

Musings on Impermanence

So many nights I have looked up, to the sky, waiting for more than just stars and the lonely moon to lift my spirits. The night sky is one thing that has made me keenly aware of my own mortality and also of others around me. The impermanence of everything. How small we are in the grand scale of things. How tiny and inconsequential we and what we perceive to be our problems are. How in the universe we are smaller than dust. So invisible and so mortal. Like the videos they show of flowers blooming from buds and withering away in a matter of seconds. Life as a progressive degeneration of your highly vulnerable body. Before I knew it I was born. Before I know I will grow old. My hair will turn grey, my smooth skin would wrinkle. Since nothing escapes gravity my curves will droop and I will have small saggy bags under my eyes. And everything I so clearly see now will turn hazy. Everything that tastes so differently in my mouth would all be sawdust to my non functioning taste buds. Notes would escape my ears and I may be denied music. Such is my destiny. To wither away slowly.  And I will meet others like me. I will live with them, love them, make love to them, hate them, miss them, remember them, forget them, long for them. And they will do all this to me. And then there will be others. Others that come like shooting stars momentarily brightening the sky of your life before fading away, perhaps forever. Others who come from nowhere and disappear into nothing. Who like shooting stars sprinkle magic wherever they go and make you wish upon them. And carrying your wishes off they go, things of beauty, innocence and wonder. Beyond the ordinary. Perhaps it is them that I'll miss the most when death finds me. Them that I'll carry in my heart. To some I may perhaps be a shooting star. Perhaps. Or so  I wish. A life so short. Battling my own destiny to be forgotten. Strange. No matter how my thoughts stray on starry nights and turn solipsistic they also fill me with a despondent love for my fellow beings. And even when I stand at the risk of alienating myself from them, I love them with a beauty that only detachment can bring. The beauty that can only be found in loving ephemeral things. Things elevated in their beauty by the singular fact that they wont last forever. To be mortal helps me appreciate everything I see and experience. It makes me lust for life, time, faces, sounds, emotions. It makes me fall in love with life. For all that began with me. For all that will end just like me.

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