He was born with five toes on each foot, and five fingers on each hand, of which he had two. And in is head there was a brain, nascently frameworked by the genes his parents had given him, later engendered by life to have a character, personality.
These life experiences shaped him. Like a block of stone, what he brought was cut, hammered, drilled, chiseled and polished. Parts of him came into being, some were broken off (some of those parts he liked and would have rather kept), other parts emerged from beneath the rough stone to stay. Some cracks were polished over, others stayed. He became who he is in a gradual process, and who he is changed from time to time. He learned to like, to love and to dislike, to hate. He learned and discovered, he would forget, rediscover, and forget again. He would try, he would succeed, he would fail. To make it through his day he made assumptions, created stories that placed people and events into a context he could understand. Sometimes these stories he told himself were correct, but all of them guided him, which is why for most of his life, though he did not know it, he was lost. He learned to wonder, to fear, to discover and to hide. He learned pride, and he learned shame (a terrible thing). He created his secrets, he made his story amongst them, he cataloged his dreams, none nearly as accomplished as he might wish. He suffered, he caused suffering, he brought peace and he brought comfort. He won, and he lost, and he enjoyed his life such as it was. He loved, unrequited, and requited, and he had his heart broken, to heal again. He learned to never be vulnerable, and for this, no one really would ever know who he was. His crowning achievement was his children, who also had the good fortune to have been born with all their fingers and toes, and to have received a better compliment of genes than he had, thanks to their mother.
But his story was not this. His story was what he saw, what he felt and how uncomfortable he became when he went off script. But it was also the part he played in other's lives. He entered, he changed things, and he left, and these encounters changed him too. That part of his story was never available to him unless that person stayed, or came back, and that bothered him. His life wasn't wasn't written by him, but by those who came into his life, and the events that happened to him. Sure he made choices, but these too were limited by what was available to him (he could not chose what he did not know, and the wiring in his brain may from time to time betray him). Its in the fabric of trial and adventures that seemed at the time entirely not what he had planned. It was a pattern that was his story, a broad cloth of varying colors and textures, that recorded his life, but it was not the whole story. Like the movie, which tells less than the book, much of the meaning was lost. At times it was as if others existed only as they came into his space, and ceased to exist when they left, that his life only mattered when others were around. No matter how close, they were always separate: they were not him, they were not in his head. He wasn't even sure they existed at all, let alone when he saw or heard them. He spent his entire life trying to please others, and this hurt him, scarred him, deeply (second only to shame for the things that destroyed him while he lived). It made him leave most of himself behind. At times he felt like a pawn, or a pachinko ball in someone else's story, their lives defining his. Frequently he would acutely attain a consciousness that he existed and that moment of reality startled him. He would marvel at it. Other times it was as if he was looking back through the pages of a book, reading what had happened to a character that just happened to be him. He wasn't sure if it was a bad thing that he could not page ahead to see what would happen to him next. Nonetheless, it was a story, it was his story, and it was well that he lived it, because, well, it was his moment. His one and only moment. He was an actor in his own play, yet he did not write the scenes. He was what he thought he needed to be, he was not who he was. And that is how he wasted his one life.
In the end his body failed him, he died, and what he was returned to the part of the cosmos called earth. In time no one remembered him. But for the time he was, he mattered, he just never knew. It would take days, years, millions of years, eons, but eventually all that was him would exist again as specks of matter in millions of other things throughout time, pretty much just on this one earth. He was him only for those briefest of moments that those particles that were him came together in one place and stayed for a while. Now that those pieces fell apart he wasn't him. He simply wasn't anything at all.
And that, simply, is the meaning of life.
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