Bookmark #575

Sometimes, I wake up early and have coffee, and I think about how insignificant my role here is, that this may be all I have to give to the world. I think of my contribution so far—how little I have managed to change things, of how most lives play out the same way. While this makes it sound like a bother, it is not. It is only tepid disappointment. To think otherwise would be to live in agony. It is the disappointment like that of coffee not being how you like it, of not being invited to someplace you did not want to go to in the first place, of only one leaf dying in a flourishing tree, of the insignificance in all things, of things happening and not affecting anything else. Sometimes, I wake up early, and my life feels like a long series of inconsequential moments. I stand in the cold embrace of the morning hours and make my peace with it.

But then, as the day gets on, my brazen dejectedness tempers a little, and I think maybe even someone like me can push the world and make it spin someday. Yes, perhaps someone like me could do it, too. But not today; today, I have to live how I live, unnoticed and unremembered. There is peace in this, too, but there will be satisfaction in knowing that I stood for something when the tail-end begins. I wonder if most lives are spent this way, even those lives that eventually move the world and make it skip a beat while it spins around itself.

We live as if there are rules to it. We talk of the world as if the world is a single, consistent entity that has always been this way. That is not the way it has been, however. The world I live in, the world you live in today, is the first time it has been this way. As I try to understand things, so does the world. Every year, things change; every year, how things usually happen changes with them. The usual is as transient as someone’s mood, which can begin one way in the morning and, come afternoon, become something entirely different. I am this way for the first time in the world, and the world is the way it is for the first time as well.

Things, unexpected, incredible things, may happen just yet. We could never know how things happen until they do.

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