Making sense
1. Life spiralling out
The squiggle starts tiny. Minute circles like a speck of dust drifting through a shaft of light, almost indiscernible by naked eye. Then some years pass, the circles grow into bigger loops, expanding to the size of a wedding ring, a cheese burger, a hot-air balloon. It goes on for a tiring twenty, thirty years, until one day the force reaches its farthest point. Squiggle still makes many fat twirls for some more months. Habits formed for a lifetime has a legacy force. But the momentum is less and less fuelled by fear and hunger.
A question arises, in many forms and concerns with seemingly different things, but comes from the same doubt: is this what life is all about?
2. Move away from moving
The great dwindling begins. A few eye-pleasing artefacts, luxurious mouth pleasures, information for knowing's sake. All out. Turns out many can be relinquished. Most possessions do not affect human survival. In the name of utility and progress it was the ego who got fed.
Then some more back and forth of chasing and letting go, in search of the smaller and simpler.
Equanimity is a few seconds of bliss. Trying to get hold of it is a trap. The trade-off of riding a sensory nirvana: the pervading noise afterwards is thus unbearable.
Another year passes.
The problem: success is reaching the endpoint of an ever expanding space.
A solution proposed: don't circle out farther.
But desire doesn’t go away. Trying to stay still could be another trap (where living with less becomes a reverse competition). Energy needs to be spent or it morphs into another disorder.
What then? Is there a way out?
Looking for an escape from our fleeting existence can also be a trap.
3. Neither nothing or all
There is a thinking process, a value judgement for a situation to become a problem.
In the beginning emptiness was everything. Nothing separated. Then something stirred into forms. Differences slowly emerged. Then homo sapiens came along, articulated existence with moral narratives. Created an undertaking for themselves.
Positing humans's finite ability and existence a failure is turning circumstances into affliction.
Solution revised: Accept the human need to make sense, appropriate and construct meaning out of chaos. Embrace the murkiness, the lack of a centre, the certainty of death. And embrace, also—the uniqueness and complexity of every single thing in every irreducible moment.
4. Coming full spiral
That the coil is mortal, its movement transient doesn't nullify its force. Every movement we make, it sends forth reverberations that change the state of reality. Changes that are minuscule and indirect most of the time, but all feed into the cosmic flux.
So choose an undertaking, do it with unsparing effort. Be content with squiggling small, singular marks that go unnoticed by the rest of the world and fade into oblivion. Take comfort that our actions make a difference none the less, all the time.
Photo credit: Will Scobie / Benji Gordon