Light, Light

December 31, 2012.

To be a disillusioned and discouraged youth, is to have no inherent tangible value. A young person owns nothing but a sense of “self”, but when all that is “self” has been revisited, challenged, and personally debilitated in frustration, there is nothing left. Ambition has long been devoured by a confused stupor. In a last attempt to grapple onto anything from this messy casualty, I could only salvage the remains of a simple human heart and perhaps in the end, it is also all I can afford to offer after everything else has been torn down.

Ai.


Human life is the roughest draft amid myriad consummated projects; A human mind, an incomplete system in a coincidental universe; And the human heart, possibly the most contradictory existence, constantly balanced on an awkward teeter-totter between opposites.

Simply: Human existence is light and indefinite. It is not final, nor is it the “truth” which we  occasionally take for granted. It is an improvisation, consisting of one spontaneous mistake after another, with the tentative hope of  achieving righteousness.

We stumble and claw our ways through the meaningless systems we made up along the way—funny enough, their purpose being to provide order and meaning—seeking formulas that will land us in a secure cranny where we can escape our naked insecurity. This is the supposed human struggle.

There are casualties in every struggle. Nights and days, I wondered what the casualties in our struggle are. I thought I discovered it: the spirit. Convinced that everyone was a soulless automaton operating solely for self-interest in the material twenty-first century, I condemned their shallowness and ignorance. I believed I had solved the question regarding human struggle: that it is all based in selfish materialism, nothing more. Not only is that a premature bias;  It is an irrelevant evaluation.

I realized that it was a mistake to create a definition for something that is indefinite. But even within something as arbitrary as human existence, there exists a common humanity.