Existential Utterance

I wrote this in Crested Butte, CO on Dec.27, 2010 when I was unable to sleep because of the high elevation at some 10,000ft….It’s pretty fluid with the existentialist genre borrowing some themes from Nietzsche, Sartre and maybe even Kierkegaard.  I’m not too specific, but pretty exact and a little abstract. I touch on themes at the heart of our existence, religion, death, and even truth.

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It’s never been about the what, never been about the end or the final place we end up.

What?

It’s not the destination that’s important, it’s the path; it’s always been the journey.

Cliche!

Do we really end up anywhere? I don’t know about you but I’m stuck in the present. I think about what I did today, I think about what I will do tomorrow, but I do it all right here. Everything that I am capable of happens right now, everything else is simply speculation and hypothetical. Now I am ready to begin –

There is no end. There is no end to this world. There is no end to life. Don’t take this literally. Well you can if want, I guess. Life is time. Time is abstract. Time is… what is time? Time is life. It’s forever.

In this world, we are dropped. And so we fall…there is no one to catch us. We hit what we think is the ground and scurry about. Initially in a frenzy, but soon in rhythm. It seems this is natural; something we must do – obey! Something about our disposition, something about our construct. We just do. Watch the newborn turtles scrabble toward the sea. How? They just do.

And so we are animals in this world. We obey, we follow, we do what comes natural. We eat, we sleep, we do what we must to survive. Instinct, subconscious, gut feeling – they are our guides. For what though? You decide.

God died a long time ago, although not soon enough. Nonsense aside, we’ve always been masters of our fate.

One day I woke up and decided there was a God. He must. How else could this world be? I scribbled down what I heard Him say and went on my way. Listen! This is why we are here. This is what we are supposed to do. So do it! or better, believe it.

And so I spread the my word, and they spread my word, and soon all knew of my word. But wait? Did you get my word or His word? Sounds like mine to me. Is my word ordained? So I tell you.

But what about things not said or mentioned? Seems like we just go on and figure it out. Interesting…we just figure it out. Let’s not get specific, it may get ugly.

This is what we do, we figure. Do we ever figure it out though? We’d like to think so. Do we really though? We say this is the answer. But there is a problem with this answer because we figured it out. I’ll say it like this – stop after figure. We figure.

We are damned to perpetually figure but never reach the end. There is no end – time is forever. If there is no end, then why do we say we have reached it? Foolishness. Vanity. Who knows…

There is no end to reach. The only real end is death. We can take aim at some abstraction in the hypothetical, but here and now, we must figure. If we figure it out, we stop. But we cannot stop until death. And so if we are living we never figure anything out. We are constantly in motion. Truth is never final, at least not until the last man has had his say…We must accept this limbo for what it really is. We must accept ourselves for what we really are.

–Zac Fabian. 2010