I won't go into a lot of detail, except to say that these old attachments and desires did me no good at all for the years they dominated my outlook. They caused me more pain than happiness, time and time again.
It would make sense, in a sort of perverse way, if I had made fifty million dollars as an email spam supremo and I was having trouble giving it up. But this is more like having repeatedly hit my my head on the ground while bungee-jumping from bridges, yet waking up in the middle of the night missing bungee-jumping.
"I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit."– attributed to Mark Twain
Our default state, as I wrote previously, is to not exist. The universe was around for billions of years before my arrival, and the energy and atoms which at the moment make up what I still tend to think of as 'me' were, during all those millennia, part of the vast, unthinking, unknowing machinery of the cosmos.
The same thing is true of all of us. Our basic material spins and hums as the planets orbit their stars, then suddenly, bam! We are tumbled out of that eternal mechanism, jumbled, bumped and tossed about for a few decades, just long enough to wonder, 'Hey... what the fuck?!'
Then, with none of our achievements or failures, pains or pleasures having registered more than the most infinitesimal impact, we are pulled back into the cosmic clockwork from which we were previously ejected, and it all goes on as if we were never here at all.
4 comments:
I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead--and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
Oh, how wonderful to "start dead"!
I don't see how you can rule out at least the possibility of reincarnation.
A cloud of atoms.
Or events, unfolding.
The show ain't over until the atoms stop singing. And that's never.
It seems to me you make a lot of assumptions. That billon's of years thing is totally imagined and undocumented. I do remember as a child wondering at the newness of my existence though. What if it's not random? What if it's planned, what then?
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