“There will come a time… when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this … will have been for naught…. There was a time before organisms experienced consciousness  and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

The Fault In Our Stars John Green

I look up to the stars not often enough. It isn’t that I am under any false beliefs that they are not infinitely awe-inspiring, I suppose it is just that I can only take small doses of being reminded of my insignificance. The stars give many illusions, but their honesty is not one of them. They tell the truth more purely than most anything or anyone here on Earth.

Swept up in the romance of life & death, I sit trying to summon up a way to be remembered for eternity, and I find myself empty handed. What possibly could I leave behind that would be of any significance? Death does not scare me, it is not being remembered after death that frightens me so. From what I gather though, it is that the very desire to leave behind a  legacy that proves to be unbelievably narcissistic and naive. Or just, human. For, what more of a divine gift could we ever hope to receive or bestow than just simply (but not so simply) our improbable existence of conscious life here?

There was a time when I suppose I just wanted there to be an answer, a reason, for all of the pain. Was there some bigger purpose to it all? For surely, if there were a grand reason for the pain I have both inflicted and endured, then I could perhaps receive a clear portrait of what I must do to be remembered. I am spiritual but not religious. We are all allowed our own vice, our own comforts, our religion or lack thereof, our journey toward answers to our own personal questions …  please do keep in mind that I have no desire to be a part of the discussions that try to deprive people of that right.  I just find that I have a distinct inability to put my faith in something that I have no connection with. I want to be inspired, freed. And so, for my question, a divine answer is not easily found.

Maybe there is no reason for pain, for fears, for cruelty. A passing of time brings & takes what it will. Improbability has always been my companion. In a way, I find comfort in the ‘no meaning to it all’ theory. Pain simply demands to be felt. In another way, it is devastating … for I am a hoper, a wisher, a wants-to-believe-in-meanings’er.

And so my search continues, which is one that I hope never ends. An answer may be what I am seeking, but an answer is something I hope to never find. At least, not in this life. What a bore life would be without a quest.

[these really are the thoughts of a lunatic]

Cred:
I stole the words in my title from The Fault In Our Stars by John Green.

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