I do not believe there has been a wholly original idea since someone said, “I think I will stop using my arms as legs and stand the fuck up.”
Those of us thinking today flow from that original thought and have merely borrowed from it and wrinkled it into an incalculable number of permutations over the ages.
Everyone copies, plagiarizes, and hopefully grows the efforts of others. If there were other wholly original thoughts, they are now lost to us, buried under the passage of time and the infinite number of embellishments that were born by it.
As a plagiarist and absolute center of all that I know, of every experience ever had and the few that remain to be had, the diminishment of my aspirations seems unavoidable. Aging has settled me into a slowing dance between spasms of desperation and quiet resignation. I’ve never had an original thought. A few good tweaks were the best I could hope for.
My ego has become an uncomfortable thing. Un-stroked by recognition, awash with influence or at least a lot of cash, it gnaws as I age.
How can a life that began with extraordinary good luck, mostly happy and honest, surrounded by love, be unfulfilling? I think it must happen to many of us as our lives are stretched out in the rear-view mirror, and we see the attainability of so much more that now the loss of time and energy has rendered unobtainable.
As a six-year-old I knew time was short. It was on that birthday that one of my always wiser older brothers informed me that life expectancy was 60. Just ten more, six-year birthdays and it will all be over I was told. I am fairly certain not a day has passed in all the days that followed that I have not thought about the time I have left. Time now left? Well, that past none fourteen years ago.
I now live on lucky time. In my youth I responded to that calculation with a spasm of discomfort but would quickly recover and head out for some more play, always thinking that I would make my life worthwhile another day. When another day finally arrived, I would be 31 and about to be born again but not in any Christian sense.
Everyone has a story to tell, and this is mine. No great drama, no epic events, no marks to be recalled by anyone but me. Telling your story in a way that would have anyone else give a damn seems farcical. I have no confidence that I will tell mine in a way you would give a damn, but it has some interest to me and there seems some value in thinking through all that has been me and imagining what might have been. So why not? Hell, now in the retirement I wish I had never attained, what else do I have to do?
In the end, what I see of human beings is what little it would have taken to make life so much better than it is for all of us. If only we would recognize and invest in the obvious, that one precious difference that sets us, as humans, apart from all other species: our ability to know.
In case you missed it, I am as close to a miracle as you will ever know, and so are you. If the teeniest difference in time or circumstance had changed in your line of ancestors from the very first time a cell split, 3.8 billion years ago, you would not exist. Having been given such a fantastically improbable chance, you would think we would make more of it.
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016