The Vagaries of Everyday Life

Think you have it all figured out? That life is all set and ready to zoom off into the sunset on a Trans Am with a stetson perched carelessly on its cranium? This is where you pay off your debts, reap dividends and roll around in some serious moolah? Heh. If only it ended at that.

That is the beauty of life innit? Nothing is ever enough. One thing leads to another leads to another and another and another, like a colossal snake swallowing its own tail again and again and getting fatter by the second in the process. Not the most pleasant imagery that obviously but it captures what I want to say quite succinctly indeed. I am more or less set now. I have a clear idea about where I am and where I am heading in the next few years. I should be heaving a giant sigh of relief and throwing back a drink or dozen in celebration. But I am not. The snake makes yet another round.

There is so much more to do. So many more worries to notice and take care of. Gaining in life means you also get capable of handling more and more problems that were previously out of reach. Ignorance is no longer bliss. There is a whole new world of potential sorrow and pain waiting out there for you. The veneer of stability is at best a flimsy fabrication of our fertile human imaginations. Doesn't take much to poke holes into it. A throw of the dice, a bad game of chance and we are back on that rickety little coracle we started this ride on in the first place.

What to do then? Keep bailing out water from your leaky boat or turn around midway and head for safer shores? No one will really mind if you do the latter. They'd be disappointed yes and you'd have to settle for much lesser, but there will be that sturdy ground beneath your feet that you wouldn't be swept off any time soon. There will be a surety and certainty about your place in the grand scheme of things. Call it acceptance, destiny or plain old satisfaction with one's lot in life; everything will just be a lot more saner. No more craziness. Just lots and lots of plain old sanity.

And so I guess it is with everyone. We row and row and row till we can row no more; the scope of human life, the very meaning of our existence firmly set in the strength and firmness of our sinews. And on and on this goes, one birth after another, towards the endless horizon. If there is such a thing as nirvana, maybe that horizon is not that endless after all. Maybe there is a spiritual Valhalla somewhere out there just waiting to be found. Or maybe there is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just you and that coracle and an endless expanse of water. 

The journey or the end? Which is better? Is the end just a stale dour full stop on the music sheet, or a  lead-in to a whole new stanza? And the journey? A waste of time or the actual true meaning of life? I always wonder, always end up writing a whole bunch of nonsense about it. As long as these philosophical meanderings keep me writing I guess it is fine. Been a while since I wrote anyway, I have a lot to be thankful for and a lot more to be thankful for in future too. I hope so at least.