I can't say that I ever claimed to know the meaning of life or if there even is one. I haven't and I'm not so naïve as to ever fall into the kind of foolishness required to make that kind of claim. That isn't to say that I'm not foolish in some way or another though. I think that maybe everyone is. In some way. I'm young and I have already made peace with the knowledge that regardless of how old I manage to get, I'll continue doing foolish things for foolish reasons. I don't expect that to change. I can make plenty of mistakes and try and learn from them as best I can, but at the end of the day, when the sun begins to set and the night prepares to drop her veil, I'll still have a good many mistakes that I never could seem to learn anything from. A lot of fuck ups I can never hope to rectify no matter how badly I would like to do so. And I'm okay with that. At least as okay as someone could be with something like that.
I'm not afraid of dying so much as I am fearful of dying without having left some kind of impression behind. I don't necessarily aspire to inspire, but I believe that everyone wants to leave a little something useful behind because while we all must die at some point, there is no reason that we can't break off some piece of ourselves and make it immortal. Or that's what I like to think anyway.
We begin life directionless, helpless, and wholly dependent and the unfortunate truth of the matter is that some of us remain that way until God calls our number. Some of us procrastinate and squander our days away without even realizing it until it's too late. Until we wake up one morning and we look at our drawn and weathered faces in the mirror and it occurs to us that we have lived and lost and suffered and loved just like everyone else but still have nothing to show for any of it. Now, as we stand gawking in a dirty mirror with our deep wrinkles and our white hair, we realize that we missed the train somewhere along the way. Maybe we didn't hear the boarding call or maybe we just dozed off on the bench, but it doesn't really matter how it was missed because it doesn't change the fact that it left without us and you can't catch a train that has left the station.
Squandered opportunities. The uncertainty of it all. I guess that's what scares me the most. You never really know who you will meet, what kind of impact they will have on your life, where you'll go, how you'll end up. Not even the attentive folks who caught their trains have the benefit of knowing such things. They're just as blinded to the future as the rest of us. But their odds of having a brighter future--well, they're significantly more favorable. I often wonder what it is that drives people to do different things. Why is one man so adamant, so persistent, while another dicks around and wastes his life away? Can it be contributed to personality? I think maybe some. But to say that personality is solely responsible--it just doesn't seem likely to me.
I often ponder such matters, but I also wonder if worrying about it will make much of a difference because when it comes right down to it, I don't think I'm prepared to buy into the idea that knowing anything for certain is even possible. How can it be? How can certainty have a place in such an uncertain world?
But maybe that's the thing, you know? What if there is some meaning to life and it just so happens one finds it if they manage to find comfort in the uncertainty?
I wouldn't know. Probably never will. But I can speculate and I guess that provides me with that flicker of hope that drives me forward. Because without that, I would have no incentive to keep going. And I don't imagine it's really any different for anyone else either.