Another Choice

We say: “oh, to be affranchised of all responsibility and of the duty to exist, to be taken back into the formless, nameless Whole!”

We say: “oh, rather die, now!”

***

We are heavy because, separated, we must ourselves carry our weight.

It is this weight of the separation that makes effort obligatory.

And so, sometimes, we do wish, we do almost call this death and, with it, the cessation of this subjugating obligation, the annulment of our debts, the erasing of our responsibilities.

Whether upwards or downwards, whether through renunciation of the world and extinction, dissolution of the person into the unknowable, or through thrust and fall and somersault of exacerbated sensual desire and drunken, intoxicated possession – this unbearable solitude must end!

But when does it ever happen to us to be floating, to be lifted and borne and buoyed as if by an infinite river, infinitely safe?

When does it ever happen to us, without resignation, to truly rest?

Our age-old experience of being as if waited on by surrounding lurking inertia at the least lapse of our effort to stand straight so as to be human – persons rather than magma – leads us to associate any rest with a loss of control, a loss of self, a defeat, a fatal throw.

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