This fluid life is lived between
birthday and death-day,
a rising and a falling spread
across years of seeking and
finding that is dressed up
for the world and naked in
spaces hidden from the light.

So, how shall we each live
this life that is ours but is
often claimed by others?

How shall we live in this
one-time interval between
conception and dissolution?

Perhaps we are free to choose
and find a path as Sartre writes,
or be honest about the meaninglessness
of it all as expounded by Camus.

Whatever way, we are here now
as the truth of human existence,
as Heidegger has long said,
here in this body experiencing
the world, here contemplating
our presence and the history
that made it so, here with
each other in this constellation of
connection that hold us together.

We are contained in this bounded space
that lies mid-way between infinitude
and the finite, between God and one-cell
life from which we all came, always
on the border between life and death,
and held in the crisis of uncertainty and
the search for certainty that is as
illusive as finding ultimate truth.

Here we stand on this awful threshold
between nothing to nothing and wondering
what we do about this space that is only
ours to make and only ours not to make as it
unfolds in time towards its terminus point.

 

31/8/2024