As I have grown older and wiser and tamer, my cynicism and objectivity seem to have kept the monster quiet. Maybe it is dead, starved from the various raw emotional and intellectual vomit I used to feed it every day. Have I grown numb? I now struggle to remember how I used to feel and think. Has it really happened to me (too)? All this time the old used to say, "when you're older, you'll see"... And I do. I do see things and they make more sense or the nonsense that they are simply rings true and final. No pondering. God doesn't exist and is an aberration in our evolutionary trajectory. We are not special, just animals with a more developed brain which gives us no advantage when the end comes. We will die like the ant, the whale or the robin. There is no meaning to our trajectory, and so the quest for meaning is vain and doomed. Accepting this makes for a more peaceful life, freed from the agonies of uncertainty and the heart-wrenching need to "do something about it". I am not special in the scale of the universe or even human history. I can only be special to a handful of mortals I'm sharing this curious state of existence with. And this should be my only comfort, my only desire, my only goal. Is this happiness? Renouncing. Accepting. Laying down the arms and rolling over submissively and contented.
How far I have come since the days where I couldn't live hard enough, bursting at the seams with the need to mean something, to transcend our condition, to understand it all. I felt alive in a passionately but highly destructive way. And now it feels like I've wasted precious years forever, lost in the refusal to surrender. A betrayal to what we could be, what I could feel I could be... But no one's done it. Many have skinned their knees and bled their heart and wasted their mind away. They still just died as the ant, the whale or the robin. They may have said beautiful things, but they hurt like the promise of some great meaning for our lives, which is never held. It was my religion. And growing older has made me kill that God too.
So now it's just little me, some others and the whole universe.
