a collision of rings

It was said that his secret was that life moved through him, while he moved through life. Long ago he stopped taking most things seriously enough to become annoyed with them, but there were those things, in his older years, which he recognized as annoyance worthy. The common thread was a strong distaste for self centered arrogance, in thought, action and word. Needless to say, he was, though few would agree, a curmudgeon, for it seemed to him the world had become overrun by fools.

 

His cigar mused its way to a stub as he worked it between swigs of Summer Shandy, watching what he thought were bugs flitting across the tongue of sea that ran into a small cove behind his house. He wandered slowly around in his mind as he contemplated the converging ringlets that seemed to appear without reason, changing the otherwise featureless surface as the tide ebbed. Like so many things in his experience, and it was wider than most yet not enough for his liking, they existed in the scope of the entire universe in this one place, this one moment, and he was here to witness it. In the scheme of things it warranted no notice at all, but it existed, and he, the sole being in the entire cosmos, was there to see it. He tried not to give it more meaning than it was worth. Surely something similar was being witnessed by someone else on some other rock circling around some point of light elsewhere in time and space, and these too were in and of themselves, pointless. But these ringlets, these bugs, they were not simple things at all. The effect was simple, yes, but think for a moment how many trillions of years of evolution were required for this crossroads to occur now, in his eye, his experience.

 

This rock, his interesting minuscule rock, was filled with insignificant things that thought themselves significant, all too often at the expense of other no less significant things. A world contrived only through narrow minded availability heuristics and fear that lead to superstitions that required unspeakable illogical reverence less the whole house fall. One bug needed power over another to preserve their sense of idea, their ringlet. This lead to a lot of bugs feeling offended as ringlets collided, when truly they were simply annoyed, but this sense of offense claimed a greater significance than was deserved, leading to anger, suffering, bloodshed, the end of the one thing that actually mattered. Meaningless ringlets converging from meaningless bugs, unnoticed in the cosmos, that ruined the wonder that was a life being lived so briefly even in its full time. So many spend so much time struggling to create and preserve ringlets, others enduring those inevitable collisions, when the featureless surface was itself enough, pristine and selfless. This one life missed, lost, because life moved around it, rather than through it, the forest being overlooked for the proverbial trees.

 

It began to rain. He wondered if they weren't bugs at all, but wayward raindrops that skewered the sea and took him on this, another journey, that he had imbued meaningless with meaning. He took another puff, and realized he needed another cigar...

 

Posted with Blogsy