Bookmark #319

( 2 min )

I was tone-deaf to the sound of certainty. I could not know it even if I had it in my hands—not that I have ever had it in my hands. There is not an atom in me that is certain. Perhaps this is why I have searched for it all my life—in places, vocations, and love. My finding has been to no avail, but I have learned something else about it. I have learned to revel in the lack of it. To embracing being lost, to moving without knowing, to doing despite the odds is what it means to be human. It is the simplest truth there is, and it is the only truth there ever will be. To be human was to be uncertain. There was freedom in not knowing. It was the only thing I was sure of now.

I have not known who I am for a single second. All my words have been attempts to reach some conclusion for this inquiry, but I have been grasping at straws, and I have nothing to show for my search. All I have managed to understand is that there exists in me—in everyone—an immense ability to start again, to redefine ourselves at the slightest hint, at the smallest wish, at the softest urge. Before we knew it, we were people vastly different from who we thought of ourselves to be. Perhaps, that is what I was supposed to be—an example. Even if that were only for the ten or twelve people who were privy to the events of my life.

And what of life? Life is cunning. It’s like a little fox who you notice peeking at you from between the woods. As you look away to call a friend or take a camera out to treasure this moment of pure happenstance, the elusive fox runs away. When you look back, everything is changed. There’s no fox, only its footsteps. They remind you of how it was there once, that you did not imagine things. Before you know it, life changes, and there was not much you could do to change this—only accept that there may be something else soon where there was a fox once. That even the footsteps are gone eventually, forgotten, trampled by a deer who walks over them or washed away in the rain. You could only look at the clearing from between the forest, but you could not know.

It is the only lesson I have learned so far—that I don’t know a goddamn thing, that it is meant to be this way.

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