Another Choice

We forge our own character, develop our own will and our own capacities, train and sharpen our own faculties, cultivate our own assets and make use of our own talents and we acquire the desired possessions and, little by little, attempt to achieve and perfect our own self-image – soon enough, though, to be able to profit from it all, since death is lurking.

And one fine day we realize that the only power that is durable and constant and true is the power to BE.

The only power that matters, in the end, is the power of BEING.

***

Thus we go, from defeat to defeat and contradiction to contradiction, until we understand profoundly that the only real freedom is to unite with truth and the only real identity is, indeed, in truth.

We are accomplished individuals, battle-scarred and toughened adults – or wizened dried-up veterans, tired matronly shrews.

We are bandits or bankers, prostitutes or corporate managers, virtuosos and shop-keepers, teachers and mendicants and louts, we are mister or missus so-and-so and we want and crave and ceaselessly want more and at times we must trudge on through the grayness of perpetual situations and at times we are pulled into vortices of violence and greed – until all props crumble and the stage collapses.

***

Gradually, in the spiral of a strange, incomprehensible progression, we orient ourselves towards roles and situations which favor self-forgetting and allow us to relativize this little personality more or less well put together, more or less viable and more or less charged, for the sake of a cause, an art, a worthy endeavor, another human being, our children, our threatened people, a message to transmit.

Thus does a crack spread in our high fortified walls.

79