Thursday, February 03, 2005

She walked at night and slept til light.

When she awoke, she looked around
and marvelled at what she found:
a light she had never seen before.
She breathed, then she was no more.

Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull once wrote that heaven is not a place; it is a state of being perfect. We live a hundred lifetimes in ignorance, another hundred in realization and another hundred to act on that and achieve perfection.

Does it matter? Were we to die today and resurrect tomorrow as someone's sperm meets someone's egg, would it make any difference to the world? We are small, we are insignificant. Even with money or power, we are no more special than the next guy. They say nobody is perfect; they are right.

So what is the purpose of life then, if not to strive for a perfection that cannot be attained? Are we here to consume everything, replacing oxygen with carbon dioxide? Are we here to formulate theories that would soon be debunked by someone else's theory? Are we here to write blogs, offering our two cents on different issues when everyone else has hundreds of cents themselves? Why are we here?

Nothing really. Go ahead, jump of a building. Take cyanide or shake nitroglycerine. Pull the trigger or wield the blade. Drop the toaster on your bathtub. Go ahead, see if anyone cares, really cares. Time passes by, people will forget you and leave your headstone nothing more than a few flowers, which will wilt anyway, or candles, which will melt or be stolen anyway.

I once went through something horrible I wanted to die. I wanted to run, to escape, anything but be here. I slowed down my steps so that Death could catch up with me but I found him slowing down with me. I could have spun around and chased Death myself but I found myself too scared to even face him.

Now here I am, living a life of questions. What if? Why? Why not? How?

Charles Tucker, from Star Trek: Enterprise, once said there is no emotion worse than regret. Maybe he is right. So go ahead and live while you still have that purpose in life. Enjoy everything before you lose that sense of purpose. Once you do, you will be no more than a candle melting in slow agony or a fallen leaf decaying in torture.

May the fates be kind to you all.

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