Each day offers golden opportunity, an outstretched hand, a pencil hovering above a blank page. I arise to discover what awaits, whether it be the warmth of toast or the sharpness of tongues, I cherish both the same. “Practice yourself, for heaven’s sake in little things, and then proceed to greater,” shouts Epictetus to deaf centuries. But I hear, from my seat in the room filled only by sunshine, finding beauty in the way specks of dust swim in the light. Each once was part of something, and someday I will be reduced to indiscriminate flecks as well, floating in the air of a world unimaginable to me now. We all shall be unacknowledged particles drifting through the sewers and the cherished homes of the unborn, unappreciated despite all the effort we put forth today. Nature, in its living history, taking the dead into the living, life to life, dust to dust, the pattern repeats. This beauty of simplicity forgotten as the whisperings of philosophers in our age, if it is unsaid by a starlet it is worthless to the sedentary creatures we’ve become. Care not for what doesn’t come from fame and wealth, insignificant is what doesn’t bring green and gold or silken fabrics and glittering stones. I live my life in insignificance, wishing for nothing more, mistakes being just as forgotten as success.
Yet a stirring pulls many to beg, remember me, remember me, it is a human thing, a petty human thing. We, as humans, are incapable of the concept that trying to be remembered is as useless a mission as screaming at a rock to recognize you. Generations of people cry out, famous in a world forgotten, some quotes remembered, names, figures, but never entire lives. Good as neglected as bad, matterless to a world that rumbled on. Someday even the mumblings of Shakespeare will disappear, fade into obscurity, as everything does. Yet remember me, remember me. The mission that keeps the heart beating, the hope pumping through tired veins, however futile. Someday humans will be but a memory to the planet of stone and dirt, and then the planet itself will be pushed into oblivion, we will all be fragments in an endless space. Worthless it would be then to be remembered, for there would be no one left to remember. I wander in the world of the forgotten, and appreciate. Loving the sound of boots on autumn leaves, the brisk breeze that draws my skin into a thousand bumps, hair raising like a spooked cat. I answer the pleas of history, remembering, remembering, remembering, insignificance begs for attention, and so I try. A dragonfly flitting from leaf to leaf on transparent wings, nature does not ask for recognition, it has no need, for we are each a part of it, despite our attempts to distance ourselves from it with concrete and glass. But why are we so desperate to leave it? And if we are all doomed to be forgotten why are we so intent on being remembered? What is it in the human nature that makes us believe that the only way our lives are of meaning is if they are remembered? Our names all in shining lights that will burn out in time, footprints on sand in the rising tide, it is in the dark that we find rest, in the cools of the depths of the ocean we find comfort. I am happy to live in my life, it is enough to enjoy the warmth of the sunshine or charcoal tang of blackened toast, for trying to live a life of remembrance is little better than living in a run-on sentence, no real beginning and no true end, an endless rambling to an absent audience.
