All my best ideas are written on water, sinking to a bottom that doesn’t exist. Currents shift them left and right. Waves swamp them. One day I will die and take them all with me, if they haven’t evaporated first.
All my ambitions and best intentions go slack when things get hard. I lose them in my rasping breath. I struggle, like a forgetful actor in front of an expectant audience, to recall my lines, to remember who I am and what I’m meant to be doing there.
My DNA is written in helices within cells, runic codes of uncertainty, predictions for macro-action that I am not privy to. It’s not that I can’t know. We can sequence ourselves like carefully cast tea leaves, but somehow all that information does not translate to real self-knowledge. The sum is much blurrier than the decoded letters of its constituent parts.
If this is what I am, shadow and light playing across the surface of things, then what is my pain and what is my struggle? What are my ideas? What are my feelings?
The time is upon us to cultivate wrongness, to turn over our ideas for new ones, better ones, to be less sure all the time and more comfortable with the fluidity of things. It all gets easier when I remember that I’m nothing, a puff of air, a whirl of ash.
These are the things I think about when I’m moving through the world, when I’m riding my bike.
I realize we’re just dust motes. I only care that I’m fondly remembered by my kids and, potentially, grandkids, after I’m long gone after a long run on this blue spec of universal dust.