I’m sorry to say I broke the rule established in the last post. I’ve been calling this a blog. Guess I’m not on my intellectual pedestal above everyone else after all. It’s a blog. Drag…
Alright. Here we go.
You’re in a narrow hallway, walking toward a faint light at the end. The odd-looking men in the pictures on the red-and-black striped walls are grinning at you. You swear they are. You swear the walls aren’t really walls but special one-way mirrors, and on the other side everyone’s watching you. Judging you. You aren’t moving fast enough. You haven’t made enough progress. Their silent opinions weigh on you, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself they don’t.
It’s getting hot now in this narrow hallway. Your shirt is too tight. It’s strangling you. Tug on the collar. Starve yourself and drop fifty pounds so it fits better. You’re sweating now, and it appears the way forward only gets harder. That ticking sound in your ears, that of the seconds passing? It’s getting faster now. Blink, and you’ve wasted your youth wading through a pool of nihilism—the ultimate coward’s choice. Yes, that’s right. Only a coward faces the darkness of life and decides that it’s not worth living because it’s all pointless. The rest of us, those who choose to enter this narrow hallway, we know it’s pointless, and we know, in a strange sort of way each of us processes differently, that that’s what makes life worth living. As Albert Camus said, we imagine Sisyphus as happy rolling that stone up the mountain for eternity.
As the hallway gets narrower, as the walk gets harder, you realize something. You realize that there is no “them” behind the walls, judging you. It’s just you there, watching yourself, evaluating. One of life’s great secrets seems to be that nobody cares nearly as much as you think they do. This freezes you. You’ve come to another one of those strange junctions. You’ve been here before, though. It’s at a similar junction that all the moral atheists left us. They believe they’ve transcended, that they’re above the rest simply because they’ve seen what we all have: it’s pointless. How sad, they will likely never realize they’ve been left behind. Not until it’s too late. And for those of you out there who have realized you’ve been left behind, here is a simple equation to prove you wrong:
Too late = On Deathbed.
Anyway, enough of that. We’ve passed the junction of worthiness to live. Now we’re at the junction of dreams. We get here when we realize that it really is all on us to make it happen.
The only two possible replies, the two possible choices, are these:
How delightful or How dreadful.
I suppose you could also just ignore everything and sit peacefully at the junction, spending the rest of your life in your own definition of tranquility.
But I hope. . . hmm.
I hope you’ll join me on the delightful path, and we go on choosing our destinies and walking the narrow hallway.
After all, there is a light at the end.
- B.L. Zen
P.S. Thanks for all the support on the blog so far!
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