Sometimes in life--or in death, I guess--you just never know...

Do you feel emboldened or decimated at the realization of the temporality of life?

I find that I bounce between the two. I have never been one for in-betweens; I am an extremist. Some mornings, I wake up and feel thrilled and enlivened by the consciousness of the brevity of my life. I feel energized by the preciousness of the moment and excited by the realization that this one, brief flash, this ecstatic burst in the universe that is the timeline of humanity, will end. The shortness and delicacy of life makes it all the more precious. One wild and precious life.

Other times, I am so completely and utterly cast down by it. I feel the heavy clock of time weighing on me, its ominous tick-tock-tick-tock shaking my every fiber. I feel a panic, the threat of Poe-like madness. Breath shortens, enhancing the shortness of my time. The brevity. Oh, so brief...a murmur, whisper, undertone of something that prances around with self-assigned significance. This slight exhalation of some colossal Bahamut, real or imagined.

What are we?

How is it possible to feel simultaneously so mighty and so miniscule?

Every tear is a waterfall...

I have wondered a great deal lately if my lifelong search for a point and a purpose is really the great quest that every noble member of mankind must undertake.

So far in my life, it has been critical. Indeed, it has been the one thing that mattered. However many disasters occurred or uncertainties were felt, the faith in a grand Purpose made it all kind of make sense. It all connected in this one constant: that the world has a purpose. Fate has a purpose. Life has a purpose. I have a purpose.

Yet the older I grow, the more certain I am becoming that it just isn't that simple. Assuring myself that I simply cannot see the whole picture no longer does the trick. There are pieces missing that I cannot deny, and the effort that I make to force them to create a complete picture seems more and more hollow. I feel that my life and efforts are blown further and further out of control, and my neurotically obsessive need to maintain this control is being deeply and profoundly challenged.

I am slowly realizing that I am truly alone in the world. We all are. Not even those who love us the most and never want to leave our side will be there forever. Their loyalty may never fade, but a day may come when they can no longer be by your side through no fault of their own. This realization brings up mixed feelings. Some very natural depression follows from it, of course, but also a certain quietness of spirit. A neutral place that has no sorrow or joy but only contemplation. Because this revelation is a rather sacred and profound one; it changes how one lives life.

What if there is not a clear, clean-cut, easy-to-identify-and-label purpose to my life? What if the simple living of it as fully and completely as possible is all that there is? And what does this mean anyway? What if the fullest and most complete version of my life has nothing to do with the rosy images that we are taught from childhood to seek: marriage, family, children, a house in the suburbs complete with a white picket fence and a soccer mom van around the back? Am I allowed to be a wandering hippie for the rest of my life? Will doing none of the things I was taught by my society to want make me at all happy?

These answers all seem to be remarkably simple: yes, of course, do what you want! (Naturally, you'll change your mind about marriage and kids in just a few years when your bio clock kicks in and you meet the right man, but we'll pretend we don't think that until you outgrow this phase.) Be happy!

Mercy me...we all have opinions in the end, don't we?

I don't understand why answers have to be so very complicated. I'd give an awful lot for a solid "YES" "NO" or "IF YOU'RE VERY WELL-BEHAVED" to come thundering down from the Heavens. Something even I couldn't miss, ya know?

Well, wouldn't we all...