The Rest Is Silence

by =ahermin

You’ve lived so little that you tend to imagine you’re not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

Your Life is Largely Irrelevant

When you step back thousands of years at a time, and look upon all those countless people who lived, struggled, and died on this earth, who appeared and disappeared in the blink of a cosmic eye, the comings and goings of any particular person or group of people seem as the comings and goings of the smallest germ colonies in the farthest jungles surely seems to you – completely and utterly meaningless.

Sure, those men – in China and Syria – mattered to someone, but those someones too are gone and forgotten. Of what grand importance were any of them, really? They lived tough lives; ones they may actually have believed held meaning, and so they toiled and sweated, and planned and worried, to have food to buy for another day, or a roof to sleep under another night, or a goat or mule to pass down to another son.

And THAT’S what caused them such great stress? THAT!? Some crumbs for dinner, or a thatched roof for a nap!? All of which are gone by the way. All of which added no great value to their lives, or numbers to their days.

They struggled and worried and cried for nothing. They stressed and depressed and killed for nothing. Their lives had no meaning. Not a purpose, not a plan. Not a reason, nor a cause.

Their “problems” were not problems, and their obstacles were not obstacles…except in their minds.

That they existed at all is entirely irrelevant to us, here and now. So too will we be irrelevant.

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