Carousel of Thoughts

Everything could be so beautifully simple...

Life comes with prescriptions. Physicists call them laws of nature. All scientific disciplines are more or less based on figuring out why. Why does a stone fall to the ground when you let go of it? And so on. From many things formulas or rules can be derived, drilled into small children, and seemingly immovable as they become part of life. From this arise illusions of control, which tend to hit a limit precisely when invisible phenomena are involved. Like feelings. More or less all bipeds have them, yet since they cannot be grasped and seem to slip away from physical laws, attempts at explanation have been piling up for centuries, and none of them really seem to hold. Still, bipeds are unable to live in peace or harmony with one another, and it even seems to be getting harder each year to live outside the illusions of judgment, guilt, and condemnation.

Which is hardly surprising, because every phenomenon comes loaded with expectations. Sometimes it seems to me that life itself has expectations, though it does not articulate them clearly. Like some parents who put pressure and guilt on their children with phrases such as: “You know exactly what you did.” And the child stands there puzzled, wondering what mom or dad means. Life seems to work exactly the same way, constantly directing a silent reproach toward its children, who scratch their heads in unison, with absolutely no idea what life is expecting of them.

I have a hard time fulfilling expectations from whoever they might come from. There is a tendency in me to smash against the heads of all those who have expectations of me and do not phrase them as a wish or request. It is a kind of reflex in me that I could not switch off for decades. And apparently it is the same with me when it comes to life. A stubborn head, a defiant child that refuses to do what life wants from me. That may be because life does not ask me, or simply because life itself does not seem to know. “Choose one of the millions of wonderful possibilities I offer you,” says life, and the stubborn head in me replies: “Wonderful? That is only what you think!”

Quite early I realized that this makes life unnecessarily hard for me. That it would be so much easier to fly with the wind instead of fighting against it. Especially since I am not at all a friend of fighting. I can only explain it by assuming there is a Prometheus in me who wants to rise up against the gods. Who insists on being respected in his royalty, and refuses to pass tests or trials to prove that royalty. I am capable of trust, and I wonder why life does not seem to trust me. Or more precisely: I wonder why life is fundamentally on my side, yet so often does things to put beams in my path.

When it comes to the meaning of life, I now believe the answer can never be more than a hunch or an attempt at explanation. That I am invited, in the best Zen attitude, to accept the phenomena. The snag is not that I cannot accept. It is that I was never asked. No contract was handed to me for reading and signing, no right of co-determination was ever granted. Not nice, not nice at all. If a biped so recklessly crossed my boundaries, we would call it abuse or rape. Yet the constant rape of life is simply supposed to be accepted. One calls it “life,” and with that the discussion is over. Period.