Erosion of Life

In the beginning each day’s experience is exciting and new, it has a palpable flavor that is decidedly zesty – leaving to question not even for a moment that you are alive and connected and a vital part of what’s going on.  Even the unpleasant things aren’t so bad, note to self: don’t do that again, is usually enough to restore an inward facing smile.

Challenge is opportunity.  Change is opportunity. Opportunity is everywhere.  A day in the life converts directly to knowledge, and the point of being seems inescapable.

Unfortunately the everyday tedium of life erodes that flavor, badly, to the point that in the end, even that which used to bring delight becomes so dull and boring and omnipresent it makes you want to throw up in your own mouth, on purpose, if only so that, please oh please for the love of all things large and small, at least it tastes like something.  (Somehow the acrid sting of bile is the only flavor that never loses intensity.) 

Challenge saps energy.   Change is annoying -- particularly when it seems to serve no useful purpose.   Change is infuriating when it costs you in trade for someone else’s benefit.  Opportunity taunts those who’ve become so jaded they refuse to recognize it.  A day is just another incremental move toward the inevitable, and the point of being was lost so very long ago, it’s difficult to imagine there ever was one.

When exactly was your connection to the world’s goings-on lost?  Was it like bad music playing forever on hold, did you set it down and forget about it?  Would it answer if you called it back now?  Do you even care enough to try?  There was a time you might’ve pondered these questions at length, but by now apathy is by far the path of least resistance.

And so it goes, day after day, caring less and less about more and more, until you reach the point that there’s absolutely nothing left about which you could give a flying fuck.  But does that event mark the end of life?  Of course not, that’d be much too merciful, that’d prove that the universe has a heart, a soul and/or a conscience – it has none of those, it just is. 

In the immortal words of John Cougar Mellencamp, “life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”  Truer words have yet to be spoken.