What compels you to action? What drives the engine of change? Why change? This seems to be what separates the unthinking and unfeeling stone from the microbe, the insect, the fowl and the human. A propensity to move from one place to another, to and fro and finally the return.
In all the grandiose splendor of the firmament, the vastness of reality, there is nothing quite like those that are among the ranks of the “living”, those who consume of themselves and thinking creatures.
Matter as such is unfeeling and unfettered by its surroundings, doing as dictated by the matter around it, it is an unthinking and non-self-reflecting thing, yet all that are “living” are entirely made of such unliving things, born in the fires of stars unnamed, long forgotten and unseen. It’s maddening to think that such a predicament is upon us, living beings made of unliving information.
Among us are those who can be cleft asunder into two categories, those who believe that all of this has come to pass by mere chance arrangements of unliving matter and that living things are but a shimmer, the likes of which one would see a mirage in the desert, or the wobble of hot air above the hot plate, transient and immaterial. The other party believes that “living” is the ultimate reality of unliving things, to merely be witness to things around and within you is the highest state, the only true state in this universe of orbiturary fundament. Oddly and unintuitively both are true, as a wise man once said “The universe (reality) is under no obligation to make sense to you”.
In seeing this conundrum, one would be placed at a sheer cliff of inviolable cognitive dissonance, cursing both; their insignificance and their pronounced status. Why is it that in knowing this, causes us such pain? Would we be content if it were one or the other? and not both?
Suppose we assume the former, that we are in fact a squibbing thing, either in merriment or sorrow glancing through the world and universe with little consequence like a single plankton in the ocean, bound forever in the purgatory of ill-necessity and promised forever to be forgotten and inconsequential, would this truly be the case, could we discard the triumphs of art, knowledge and justice, simply because we are by some means a cosmic accident? Could that or should that be the final truth?
Let’s then assume the later as true, that living things and we humans are the pinnacle of the hierarchy of the living, on this Earth; that we as thinking, feeling and self-regulating creatures are akin to gods treading on this Earth and have the undoubting responsibility to propagate ourselves on this world, on other worlds and the cosmos. We whom, eat of this Earth, create strange machines that follow our will, we who amongst ourselves have fought in who would help guide and see the vision of humanity fully realized, we who have wrought countless tragedies and fortunes for untold millennia, we whom the universe birthed through eons of empty longing only to tread this Earth with the burden of fully realizing the universe. Would that give us peace, knowing that reality and it’s constancy is upon our shoulders, in which our actions are and will be resounded throughout the cosmos as the fundamental truth, from the pauper who begs for alms with a wracked likeness to the noble who whether in their action or inaction defines the reality of those beneath them. Is this our case? Is this our comfort?
Both are true, we are small creatures with small thinking with big hopes and dreams in a vast universe of possibility, danger and riches.
So what then drives us? Is it fear that we will disappear into the long night with not a soul to remember or yearn for us? Is it hope that we will transcend the limits and restraints that reality has placed upon us? Is it that we yearn to find the truth, to return to the source of our being?
Such thoughts do well to entertain and spur us, but offer little in the way of a living things’ daily habit. For the bacterium does not care much whether it’s food is a carcass or it’s dwelling is the innards of a beast, nor does the deer complain that it’s watering holes are rife with predators, or that it’s young may never see maturation, as such the gradient from the unliving to the living is defined by wanting.
The human is born to this world, meagre and insufferable, gifted with the faculties of great potential and flung into reality not in any way obliged to know of the secrets of this world yet eager in the pursuit of power and agency and in so doing could wreak havoc or nurture harmony in this world.
In knowing this, how little we are and how great we dream, could we then say that all who dream are grand in that we all start so little. Could we then, not as a result be drunk with hopes of grandiosity and be sober in remembrance of our beginnings, could that help us find a balance or peace with ourselves and those among us.
Who among the living can say that they do not need or want, who among us can show us a better way? Truly, it is better to be given a reward then to merely find it after a long journey, for those that give when they themselves are also wanting, transcend the plight of the living, a sacrifice of themselves for the sake of another, a small death to inoculate them from the final retreat into the unliving.
As such, those who are gracious in giving, relent not when digging their purse and ask naught in return are creatures that behave contrary to the demands of the living, those who rebel against the chains of this world, who in spite of need and want delay themselves for the sake of another, are beings that should not be ranked merely as those that are “living”.
Nay, for such creatures are of a spirit, undying.
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