Life is Interesting

Yep, I'm stating the obvious. Life is definitely interesting. It never quite matches your hopes and dreams, but it never quite matches your fears and nightmares, either. It just sort of happens, oblivious to anything you try to plan or do. Money comes and goes, health comes and goes... even people, friends and loved ones, come and go.

It sure is interesting.

Interesting despite the fact that all lifetimes can be summed up in three simple words: born, lived, died. Inconspicuously simple, and any biographer with an honest bone in their body will tell you that those three words are not only the most important descriptors in a life story, they're the only relevant descriptors in a life story. Born. Lived. Died.

Two of those words are absolutes. They happen exactly the same to everything on this planet. It's that middle word that is open to interpretation.

Some people view their lives as complete failures, while others can view those same lives as historic successes. Some view their actions in life as honorable, selfless, and totally within reason. Others see those actions more objectively: completely selfish.

People go about being honest to some, lying to others, hating a few, and loving still fewer. They work or don't, they play or don't, but all manage to affect and effect those who surround them, for better or worse.

In the end, though, what does it really matter? History books record a dishearteningly small portion of the events and people that have populated our planet in the eons since its formation. Nobody will ever hear of your aunt's neighbor's grandmother; nobody will ever hear of your friend's hairstylist's cousin. Those people just fade away, and everyone else will be none the wiser.

But, still... people like to think that they matter. That somehow the ebbing nature of time will recall the insignificant presence of the insignificant lives that are ours. Somehow, though, I don't think time gives a shit. In fact, I know it doesn't. It just ticks away in the perceptions of our minds, while we grow older and start wondering just what does happen after we die.

I don't think I'll care what happens. At last I hope I don't care what happens... I have a fear that one day I'll turn into a hypocrite and start spouting one of the humanist mythologies that we call religion as fact when they are so clearly fiction.

Time, though, is not a fiction. It may very well be relativistic, but we know it's real. And to truly live, we have to accept and acknowledge that our time, like our lives, is finite. I don't want to experience lives that don't want to experience mine... and I don't have time for those who don't have time for me.

I'll fade away, one day... of that I'm certain. Completely forgotten by people who pretend to care, but don't really give a shit.

It's all so very interesting.