The Permutations of Being Human
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2011 10:44 am
May 21st, October 21st: the rapture, doomsday, the supposed climatic finale to humanity, came and went. Everyone joked, had an opinion, or looked up at the sky with a forelonging gaze hoping for something greater to touch them and shift the existence they believed to be unmovable except by God, or a divine fsscimile there of. But here I am, sitting at a McDonald's pondering the corporate rationale that made it policy to put the cream and sugar into my coffee before I ever codled it in my sleep deprived hands, and across the room is the bearded, quite and quietly desperate human being that marked down the days till the rapture on a chalk sign and every morning, made a new batch of fliers that warned me that "The End Will Be in 17 Days!"
With a hunched over and resigned slant to his posture, his eyes are downcast to his food and coffee, lost in a constantly tired, world of one. His head is slouched toward the table, working on a cross word puzzle, a letter to himself or perhaps the long dead or separated wife that is now merely represented by a simple, polished gold ring on his finger.
It's odd, the world is in a constant state of ending where some other power is going to make things right for everyone, and instead of seeing that, all I see is a man who regardless of his personality, history, tragedy or majesty in life, perhaps only wished for something different. Something to break the routine and constant struggle and journey that is life. The proper term would be that he wished to be "saved," but that assumes there was no power in him, no struggle or will behind his thoughts and his life.
Now all he can do is go about and repeat the actions that have defined him, until for whatever reason, he is unable to do so. The greater idea, the power inherent and his ability to to be the messenger of something greater, has passed.
What is left is human. Flawed. And has maybe accepted that this will be his life from here on out.
There is something more to the idea that we can't save ourselves, that this is how it always will be and all we can do is accept it... Hope, faith, and awareness that there is something more than ourselves, are what I see permeating that idea. But what can I do? Give him a few dollars and silently wonder after him, finding an aspect, an idea kn him, that he turned to God to feel.
That is life perhaps... Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...
With a hunched over and resigned slant to his posture, his eyes are downcast to his food and coffee, lost in a constantly tired, world of one. His head is slouched toward the table, working on a cross word puzzle, a letter to himself or perhaps the long dead or separated wife that is now merely represented by a simple, polished gold ring on his finger.
It's odd, the world is in a constant state of ending where some other power is going to make things right for everyone, and instead of seeing that, all I see is a man who regardless of his personality, history, tragedy or majesty in life, perhaps only wished for something different. Something to break the routine and constant struggle and journey that is life. The proper term would be that he wished to be "saved," but that assumes there was no power in him, no struggle or will behind his thoughts and his life.
Now all he can do is go about and repeat the actions that have defined him, until for whatever reason, he is unable to do so. The greater idea, the power inherent and his ability to to be the messenger of something greater, has passed.
What is left is human. Flawed. And has maybe accepted that this will be his life from here on out.
There is something more to the idea that we can't save ourselves, that this is how it always will be and all we can do is accept it... Hope, faith, and awareness that there is something more than ourselves, are what I see permeating that idea. But what can I do? Give him a few dollars and silently wonder after him, finding an aspect, an idea kn him, that he turned to God to feel.
That is life perhaps... Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...