tracing those strands

It has recently struck me how fleeting our lives truly are. It was last year that death struck near to my heart, but it was a brutal tearing chasm. It left (leaves) me wheeling (still). It came with gasps and shouting and tears. I struggled to function, afraid of sleeping alone - instead sleeping for weeks on friends' couches. I glazed my way through relationships and schoolwork - drove through life like a fog. I hardly remember those few months. But things have slowed down. I've finally come to face the subtle whispers that I've managed to put off for so long. Death awaits - but then I only understood it as both a primal and destructive force that merely steals. There was no thought to the wisp that is life, only that it will be stolen from me and my kin. It was a trick of the eyes - almost like believing your shadow is more real than you. How absurd! In these terms, death is the shadow - waiting in the cracks. It has no life, it has no place. It is merely the outline of something greater than itself. And perhaps that is why it is so very shocking and disturbing. Perhaps the disturbance death brings is less the absence of someone and more the unnatural outline their absence traces in our lives. A shadow without a person - terrifying and evil.

There is a subtlety to this kind of thinking.

I am both relieved and discouraged by the brief lives we have a chance to live. I want to take advantage of every second, but I also realize there is little purpose to what we do exactly. I could be a seminary student, youth pastor, dental hygienist, web designer, intelligence officer, author, foreign english teacher, flight officer. Kierkegaard said possibility was the source of all anxiety. I'm starting to believe him. I could have ended up with any of my previous loves. I could have been a powerlifter or numismatist. But I'm not. I'm wearing masks day in and day out, uselessly trying to find the one that fits just right.

When I was little, I used to view the future like a strand of threads that all traced back to my hands. Each one was a path I could take. I understood from an early age that you could choose to be so many different things! What grieved me more than anything, however, was the loss of those strands. Each day that passed was the death of possibility. Strands were cut with every decision - with every hesitation. I am still that boy, frozen and staring at the strands snapping every second as I try and move - to grasp onto something worthwhile. Sometimes I feel tangled.

Maybe there is a big plan and maybe we all are playing roles cluelessly. But maybe we're all just weaving a huge web of coincidence - where some people are narrowly saved by another's thread - and where others fall through hopelessly into what emptiness lies beneath.