Chasing the Hourglass

I don't know what I am doing here, alive, on earth. Each day I wrestle shadows, fight invisible battles with assailants no one can see. Some of them arise from poisons festering in my own heart, but others come from places unknown. Even when I know their cause, that knowledge gives me but feeble advantage. 

There are so many particulates, pieces of reality, like little grains of sand, wearing me down: time and age, fear and entropy, apathy, sadness, and loss. They are all scars on my heart and mind from the things I have done, seen, and known. It can't be undone. I don't get to start over. I have to keep going, I must stay the course. 

Any and all new beginnings I may have I must engineer for myself. Yet, how do I remake the fabric of myself? I feel like I am drowning in quicksand, and the quicksand is really just a tiny desert passing through an hourglass, marking time. I can't overcome it, surely? Time marches on, unerring, a certitude for us all. I am so tired, I want so much to surrender, to leave off this battle of being, but I have so much left to do. 

I am alive, I have a life left to live. Of what consequence am I? I am just another finite iteration of consciousness in an infinite chain of iterations of awareness.

Once, I was such a warrior, such a fighter, or at least I felt and believed I was. Now it feels like I burned up all that fire just trying to survive. Where did it go? Where did come from in the first place?Once, I had all this rage, and it fueled my every endeavor. Somehow after so long, that rage turned from a fuel to a poison, a bitterness that began to eat away at me. 

I am adrift in the world with my well-intentioned, deep-seated godlessness. I have tried too many times to adopt gods, or to create them myself, only to find either result cold and unconvincing. I would rather live in the world where I know my loneliness, my sense of absurdity, is an intuition based on reality. A figment, whether adopted from the stories of others or from one I make up myself, is cold comfort on a journey I must ultimately make on my own. 

Even with my life partner by my side, as comforting as his companionship is, it is not imbued with the super-human qualities we attribute to our gods. I am not disappointed when he can not rescue me from the whirl-wind of life, when his only option to provide me relief is to join me in its peril. I would always take true human comfort, as rife with limitations as it is, to the figmentary comfort of religion. 

 If I want to survive I must relinquish my demons, I must surrender the spite and ardour upon which I survived for so many years which is now killing me. Perhaps if I can achieve that then I really will start new, because never before have I lived, created, endeavored, and dreamed in the absence of my spite. What might I have to offer, if my creativity arose from love, acceptance, and forgiveness, instead of rage, spite, and sorrow? 

In the moment of this realization, I longed deeply for a god upon whom to cast off this cape of misery, an immortal, divine power that could take my burdens from me. But that is not how the world works for me. Love is the divine, love is the power I need; through love I can forgive the transgressions of yesterday, my own, and those of others. With love I can heal the pain of disappointment from hopes that failed to flower; love can soothe away my resentment and sadness. The time has come to shed some of this pain, to let it go, to relegate it to the past where it belongs, and start new. So I tell myself.

If only the truth of life were as elegant as the stories we write about it.