Life Goes On... and Sometimes, You Wonder Why

[Ninurta]

Sometimes, when the night is quiet and you are all alone with your thoughts (and a beer, or a few) you get to wondering. Among those wandering thoughts, one pops up now and again, wondering why you lived, and they died, maybe way too young. You'll wonder, as thought progresses, if it might not, maybe be, because you are a coward, and they weren't. You'll wonder, but you'll never know, and you'll never be able to prove it to your own satisfaction one way or the other. Could have just been the luck of the draw. Maybe not.

Sometimes you'll wonder if maybe they didn't get the better end of the deal. You will live to get old and fall apart, they won't - they'll be forever young, and in their prime, just as they were when the Reaper came calling. If you manage to live long enough, you'll realize that when your day comes, you're probably gonna die like a little bitch if the shit hits the fan, because you aren't what you once were, can't do what you once could, and never can, never can be, again.

Ah hell, all ya can do is dance then! They'll play the music for you...





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[BIAD]

The tree you once climbed or the battlefield you once fought on will still be there when you've gone and to some,
there's a feeling of being cheated, being relegated to just a minor-player in the grand show that was your life.

The wind still rustles the leaves of the tree long after you've passed and there's no echoes of your exhilaration of
being high off the ground. The throb of pulsing blood in your balancing body tells you you're alive, but the voice
is really just sound of a working machine. The poets got it wrong.

The grass struggles under the snow of a long forgotten combat zone and the bones of the fallen soldier were
merely food for the plant that never knew his name. So unfair and yet, so real. The grass didn't judge you or
mourn your death, it used you and moved on. Survival demands it.

The ignorance of being unable to reflect on one's past is a two-edged sword. Whether the curse of evaluating
one's conduct at the end of the race is only a human condition, we cannot know. How can we conceive a sincere
evaluation of one's own existence, when the built-in system of survival demands you destroy any danger to that self?

The dying snail never cries out that it failed to change the world or make a difference, just as the wide-eyed soldier
cannot reasonably collate his past deeds as bullets tear into is body on the battlefield. They both perished without
someone to mourn their passing. Gone like the stored vase that cracks in an attic of frost. Nobody saw and nobody
knew.

It's only in the time given can we measure ourselves -or to put it better, in the time we carve out by our actions.
We kill to survive and bullshit ourselves with tribal morals. We slay the other because a God or evolution didn't see
the movie and had already issued their plans after the molten lava had settled.

The words said: "You. You're on your own, now get moving"
So we did. We fought our way up from the mud, we destroyed everything in our path -including each other and
now we look at the sunset and wonder if we'd done good.

And maybe -just maybe, that's the burden we're meant to carry towards the shadowed veil that awaits us.
A dark reward for the rudimentary need of a collection of cells to exist and survive and a self-aware brain to steer
a safe passage. A pretence of a set of principles based on a philosophised logic dripping with historical gore that
we've convinced ourselves will be the ticket that gets us into heaven.

In the sophist playground of our minds, we put out the bonfire of self-guilt as the leopard and alligator look on.
Do they envy the monkey that thinks that way or are they evil for licking their lips?

Meanwhile, we juggle with our thoughts and pull the curtain over the cave entrance.
Did we do enough...? Will some part of me go on after my heart goes quiet or is all this questioning just the faint
laughter of a vicious truth that the snail. leopard and the big bastard who likes golf courses knew full well?

We're here and then we're not here, so is there somewhere else or are we no more vital to the turning Earth than the
fragments of vase wrapped in faded newspapers? Stories of conquests and tales of achievement, written down and
used for nothing more than storage.

Humans measure themselves through their actions and the dichotomy of good and evil, that eternal set of scales that we
humbly pray will allot us something we cannot fathom until the moment of death.
But what if there's no weighing of past deeds? What if the imaginary next place isn't there? Surely there's more to me...?
The terrible questions not answered yet.

Time is the place where we burn and those flames draw the sweat -not from our bodies, but from our minds.
We char in our self-guilt and confused queries of why me, but the same animals mentioned above already know.
If it wasn't you who survived, it'd be someone else and your built-in systems won't allow that.

So check the bolt on the door and the nearness of your gun. Now... pull the tab of another beer and give thanks to
those soulless ageing cells in your body that watch the night.

[Wallfire]

The only glory in war is surviving it. We should be happy that life has stayed with us so we can give witness that life is good and worth surviving for. Why we survived there is no answer to that, we should honor the dead by enjoying life that has been given us. I no longer ask why, I only say thank you.

[Mystic Wanderer]

@"BIAD", I'm more convinced than ever that you are some famous writer hiding here behind an avatar of a strange humanoid creature. 
Your post was so well articulated!  And, while my post has nothing on topic, I just wanted to say

[BIAD]

@"BIAD", I'm more convinced than ever that you are some famous writer hiding here behind an avatar of a strange humanoid creature. 
Your post was so well articulated!  And, while my post has nothing on topic, I just wanted to say

The truth is that I'm a strange humanoid creature hiding behind a anorak and trying to convince myself I can type!
(But thank you!)

[Ninurta]

I believe you all have discovered the answer to the most vexing question that has plagued philosophers for millennia - "what is the meaning of life?"

As best as I can figure it, I've probably got at most 11 or 12 years left on this rock-ball. My telomeres say that I should make it an average of 25 more years, but I have my doubts I'll last that long. However long it goes, I've made it this far, and I'll make that last mile as well - kicking and screaming as I go, just the same way I made it this far.

The purpose of life is to live, and there is no rhyme or reason beyond that.

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