Life in the Fasting Lane
Right this moment it feels as though life is a spiral and I can look back across the curves down to the very centre, the moment where I ceased being a possibility and became a reality.An unintended unexpected reality - my parents wedding night was cursed or blessed depending on the point of view with faulty contraception and nine months later to the day I made my first annoyong mark upon the world.
Looking back across the coils and convolutions I have turned life into I realise the amazing joke that life plays. For each year I live I seem to relinquish some bedrock certainty. I know so much less now than I did when I was born, a squirming yellow bundle - I was jaundiced - who contained the answer to the meaning of life. And promptly forgot it when I began to talk.
So many things I knew for certain, would have fought and sacrificed over have become mere possibilities in a world filled with different paths to take, different decisions to make.
My studies of philosophy no longer enthrall me, do not capture me in impassioned rhetoric and long late night discussions because when all is said and down and we pick our bleeding selves up of the floor of some sawdust strewn after hours bar it is all theory. All opinion.
Oh, I have my favorites of course and I read Epictetus and Aurelius with great joy and rich enjoyment as I read Suzuki, Russell, Schopenhauer or Zeek. And some will mutter to themselves that these are not all philosophers and that surety will make me smile. I used to have it myself, but no more.
In fact I think the spiral is inverted in my life. It starts on some farflung wide unimaginable curve and tunnels down through layer after layer of perception to the singularity of truth that I will know without a doubt in the moment that I expire.
From know it all to know nothing to completion. An admirable path. I am beginning to suspect fasting holds surprising secrets in its emptiness. Nothing in, everything out, tabula rasa all over again.
I really am enjoying this.