The motion of life
The squiggle starts small. Tiny circles, size like specks of dust suspending in a shaft of light. After a while the dust forms slightly bigger rings, merely discernible by naked eye. Some years pass, the movement dances into bigger loops, ballooning to the size of a coffee cup stain, a bulging belly, a helicopter pad. This goes on for a long time. Twenty, thirty years. Tiring business. One day, the drive to expand reaches its farthest point. Squiggle still makes many fat twirls for some more time; 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 aspects, but comes from the same doubt.
Is this what life is about?
The great dwindling begins. A few eye-pleasing artefacts, luxurious mouth pleasures, information for knowing's sake. Turns out many can be relinquished. Most of them do not affect survival.
Equanimity? A few seconds of bliss. Trying to get more is a trap. The trade-off of riding a sensory nirvana: the pervading noise afterwards is thus unbearable.
There's some back and forth of chasing and letting go in the search of smaller and simpler.
The problem: success is reaching the farthest point of an ever expanding space.
A solution is then proposed: don't try to keep going farther. Stay where we are.
But desire never goes 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.
There is a thinking process, a value judgement for a circumstance to become a problem.
In the beginning emptiness was everything. Nothing separates. Then something stirs into forms. Differences slowly emerge. Then homo sapiens come along, articulate existence with meaning and values. Create an undertaking for themselves.
Positing humans's finite ability and existence a failure is turning a circumstance into an affliction.
Solution revised: Accept our petty ego of the 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.
That the coil is mortal, its movement transient doesn't nullify its force to influence. Every movement we make, it sends forth reverberations that change the status of reality. Changes that are minuscule and indirect most of the time, undetectable by human senses, 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 effect change none the less, all the time.
Photo credit: Will Scobie / Benji Gordon