Ideas for today's topic float through the air, thought bubbles that contain varying numbers of words that lead to concepts, or completed works, but none compel. Nothing is pressing to be articulated but wait! Upon the wind this one comes....
"Who are you? What are you about? Where are you going? And why?”
We think we know where we're going (or I where this is going) but we do not in actuality know where we are going because in actuality we know very little about what is actually going on. So we presume. A lot. There is so much that we don't know that it is mind boggling yet in order to comfort ourselves in the vastness, we focus our attention on our immediate surroundings and never look up at the stars for long because if it's a clear night and you do, everything else drops away, doesn't it? You look up at those points of light, unfathomable distances away, go "Oh S---!" and then scurry into the house to put Sportscenter on after which you exhale a sigh of relief and say to yourself "Whew! I'm back in the known!".
That doesn't change the stars one bit, they're still there.
Existential Percipience
Vincent Chin- Unsplash.com
If you work day shift a lot and you're home at night watching TV or whatever you're not really cognizant of that looming vastness just outside your locked front door but if you work night shift.....
....oh my! Not a night shift where you're in a building all evening and never go outside, no, a night shift where you are outside a lot and with nothing much to do, which is the case for a lot of night shift workers, you're just manning the place 'cuz somebody has to do it and you don't have enough seniority to have things your way so you spend a lot of time with the moon and the planets and the stars, looking at them, but that's not really it either.
What really drives the remembrance of the vastness is when you get off of work, like I do sometimes, and it's utterly still outside and the weather is such that the sky is not the least bit hazy and in all their glory the stars and Milky Way stand revealed and just glancing at the panorama you feel helplessly small and immediately wonder "How in the hell did all of this happen?" and "Where is my place in this?" and all that but you can only take so much. It's just too freaky to stand out there looking up because you know you're going back there someday and that puts a bit of humility in you, quivers the knees, and makes you review your performance during your time on stage today. A time of reckoning is going to come for you (but thankfully not this day!) because whatever created those stars and that vastness is intelligent beyond comprehension and probably won't waffle one iota away from absolute truth, which is sooo unlike the human realm, where everything can be explained away.
The stars stand waiting.
Gulp!