Tuesday, December 20, 2016

A lighter shade of black

I looked up the opposite for the word evolution today and the best the web could come up with was: decrease, reduction, stagnation, shrinkage, blockage, halt and various other iterations to stop or go back. None of them come close to what I want to describe; the sense of the rolling back of time and experience; that everything we have come to have faith in is somehow being lost to us; the inexorable march of progress, so to speak, coming undone right before our eyes; the negation of the idea that time itself is a progression towards something; that the concept of a cyclical perception of time is just something philosophers earn a living by unconnected to the reality that we all just know or have known since we were born.

It really doesn't seem delusional, does it?

After all, we are getting older from the time we are born, the interior and exterior manifestations of life do change constantly in the human experience, technology becomes upended, people die and other people give birth to more people. Can we really blame ourselves for believing that something similar is happening to the world we inhabit? Not so much in the physical sense of it as in the psychic idea of a society we leave better off as a consequence of us being around for a certain period.

What then is this world we have now come to inhabit? A reactionary, untethered beast; an anthem of war and disenchantment and vitriol and hate; a vile, exclusionary, particulate thing unfettered by civility and discourse and deliberation. What faith will we have left when this fire has burned itself out (as it will, as it must, as is inevitable) that we can once again pick up from where we left off? - In giving meaning to disconsolate lives separated as much by geography as by difference from today's frothing, teeming hordes of rabidity. In rehabilitating our effects on this planet we inhabit so as to safeguard it for generations to come. In constantly discovering the beauty, the serenity, the possibilities, the love in this world. In sharing our uniqueness, our sense of purpose, our ideals and dreams so as to contribute to a shared sense of humanity with those whom we would otherwise have nothing to do with in our day to day lives.

Will the damage not be done by then? Will the strength remain? Will the disillusion and despair give way to a recaptured sense of resolve?

Can we hold on?

No comments:

Post a Comment