An Examined Life

Picture a lens focusing in then panning out on your life.

Begin your journey in the stars, then squint your mind’s eye until you pass through the atmosphere, then the tree tops, then deep into your only human body, your literal and metaphorical heart, your breakable bones with the power to heal themselves, and your blood brewed from the earth’s minerals.

Inspect your life’s infinite complications, with its layers of variables, the unknowns and the supposeds, all the right choices and the glaring mistakes darting around like the building blocks of life itself, moving so fast you can’t tell one from the other.

Now take a risk and make a decision. Or don’t, because choosing and avoiding are one and the same. Because living in fear of the unknown or fearlessly racing around every corner of life are just two sides to the same coin. Always spinning on its axis, this penny for your thoughts blurs before your eyes into a sphere, a globe, a planet rotating mindlessly around a dying sun.

Then zoom out until you fly far away from your body, abandoning it without care because it was never yours to begin with. Push away from the house that demands your time and attention, the clouds that cast shadows on your world, and settle in among the stars that once illuminated your late-night walks.

Look down through the eyes you no longer have to rely on to see how small and simple everything appears. It’s just one life, one seemingly endless day, that’s both unspeakably cruel  and impossibly perfect.