Friday, September 30, 2022
Sometimes no answer exists – no conclusions, no meaning, no plan, no hindsight. That’s because life is more like a free-fall, an involuntary experience, with no direction nor destination. Sometimes there isn’t a way out, around, or through. There’s no way to conceptualize, either. Simply put, you can’t define an edge to reality – to create a bookend, nor carve an opening, a closing, or a pathway. Things just are.
Unclear moments are frustrating for intellectuals who feel desperate for conclusions. Maybe the answer is that life is perpetually uncertain. In other words, we’d do better to think of life as one, big question, with a never-affirming answer. Life is simply open-ended and more importantly, peacefully involuntary. Why do you even need a conclusion or a control mechanism? Aren’t all things temporal, anyway? Usually you just have one choice, to be naively trusting – that’s it.
If you are desperate for an answer, or you need to make sense of it all – welcome to hell. Life is breath – exhalation seamlessly transitions to an inhale. Where one breath ends and another begins isn’t the most important thing – it’s that it happens without your intervention and from birth till death. While breathing can be voluntary, it seems to work best when it’s involuntary. It may be time to be at peace with the current breath, as it wills, whether it be an inhale or an exhale. Life lets you sit at the controls of your breath if you desire, but it’s better to “be breathed” than to take over the breathing mechanism itself. Breathing and living are best left to their involuntary nature. Let it go, and then focus on inner peace in every waking moment. Leave breathing to itself; leave reality to itself; you’ll figure it out eventually.