TheBanyanTree: Will

[Maria Gibson]

Mark Funk wrote: 

"...the question is more one of what to keep and what to discard...."



I think it may be preferable to simply walk away.  The older I have gotten, the less I care about the material largess we have amassed over the years.  I don't really know what's in the attic and could pitch and dump the entire works in a second if it would relieve me of the task of having to go through it all.  Thinking on the piles of gone-through boxes, mountains of crap gotten out and laid to the side instead of being put away when taken out, is enough to give me hives.


Do you remember when we first entered the world as adults?  It seemed the labeled boxed were the sum definition of who we were and what we had to show for having graced this planet for what turned out to be almost no real time despite our attempts to believe it was.  From that time to this is not any longer in the grand scheme of things, it is only we who give a breath and a heartbeat a linear time line and call it a long time when in fact it isn't any longer than it is.  We lend it length.  We demand it conform to our idea of a lifetime and try to make our own determination of its end and beginning.  If I lived but a day, I would have lived a lifetime.  No more and no less than a lifetime of thirty-two thousand eight hundred and seventy-seven days.


Grasping the concept of the box's contents being of no real value when stacked against time is no easy task for social animals such as we.  Many will gasp and wonder at the sanity of the box owner and cry for the lost treasures which could be left behind in a big pile to gather dust at a moment's notice.  Truly I believe we can't be free to be who we are meant to be until we let go of it all.  The degradable materials cannot outlast time itself and are we really interested in having them do so?  And, if they can't, why do we insist on hanging on to all of it?  Categorizing, listing, packing, storing, and finally despising the whole of it?  It's a noose, no less than an anchor.  The best of the boxes and the most of the piles are locked away inside of me where I can visit or revisit at will.  The memories will suffice and even if I forget them, they'll still be here.  



Perhaps this is all too much for a Monday night, sitting alone with the hum of the appliances and the smell of chicken lingering.  Maybe it would be easier to simply lay philosophical thinking aside and not ponder the mechanics of time and why we can't reconcile it for what it is simply because we can't appreciate the answer.  The boxes up there won't go anywhere if I put their existence from my mind to return to more banal thought.  I can always come back to these questions, maybe on a Tuesday night.  The Matrix isn't really a bad place to reside, is it?


Silly human beings; tricks are for kids.  

Maria