Of Ageing and Ennui
What man comes to grips with mortality? An enlightened one? A careless one? A flippant one? Of this I know not. As young we are attuned to think we’ll live forever. As the years go by, the dark shadow of death starts creeping from behind, a sinister cloak that will nullify everything your mind holds dear.
Over three decades I have been on this world with memory. Enough cognition to understand all my follies and the world’s fallacies. As a young man, had a dare that death would consume me not. And then came experience which led me close to the precipice thrice but I came back, bouncing back into the game. I thought I won. Hadn’t I?
Isn’t this how mortal battles are won? How strange that you could simply lie in one place, pass through the continuum of time, and you’ll still lose the battle for life? Stranger yet that our perceptions are built over time, experience gained with age, all becomes naught in the collective timeline of the earth.
All will whither away. All will cease to exist. All will crumble before the slow march of entropy, eroding over a passage of dust and wind.
Eons have passed in uncovering our terra incognita. All in vain. Transhumanists vie for technological immortality. Dreams of vain, I am tempted to call put but I won’t. But a life less lived via mediums where perceptions no longer remain seems less of a life.
Oddness prevails. The older I get, the more confused I become. The larger I expand my perceptions, the more I am led down the path of fiery trials and stronger paths of resistance. The more I endure, the more the mind slips into ennui. A reflection of our times, so say the artists of yore. I am neither. Never was. And yet I merely reflect the things I’ve absorbed in the brief time I have spent on this earth.
Abstractions upon abstractions, seems the wiring in the head is askew with shortcuts formed between the most senseless.
A child comes to wish me. One I play with all the time. My old friends come with cakes. Heartening the sight, entertain them I well. The thoughts still linger. An instant of warmth floods through my body every time I reminisce. All I am trying is to grasp onto those little glimpses of joy I was exposed to. A lifetime ago. A lifetime at present.
A sharp melody plays in the seventh keys, the sound blasting through my ears, lapsing my attention back to reality. I lean back in my head, groove to what claims my attention every single time. Death will claim me. I know. But not today. Not today.
