Have we forgotten? Did we ever know? How can any of us treat each other like we can't understand what pain and hurt the other has?
Did we forget? Were we ever aware? We all walk in pain and hurt. Is it our selfishness that makes it so? Is it just life? Is it death?
We have forgotten. It happened before we realized we knew. At some point our knowledge tells us too much about the world and knowing it hurts. Like Adam and Eve we gain a knowledge that makes us shameful. This knowledge eats us and kills us. We hide and cower from its grand and powerful presence.
How can we look around amidst the beauty of life and escape its terror? This clear blue sky with blowing breezes is nothing but a cold, bland rock hurtling alone though the vast emptiness of space.
All we have is this horrible front of escape we call 'life,' and even it, we know, is fleeting. As dust goes to dust, and ashes to ashes, so do we know our hopelessness in living. All we have is this shadow. In this shadow is our life.
But we have forgotten what we once knew. The shadow is not dark. The cold orb on which we live is not dead or empty or lifeless. We alone are its life givers, as it is to us.
Our horrible fate is to live in this horrible knowledge. We can choose to live in it, as we once did blindly, or to keep it as we learned it, a selfish, lifeless abyss. Do we live somehow in ignorance? or can we live, still, with our knowledge?
Can we know that behind the clear blue sky is a world spinning itself into nothingness and see both the nothingness and the sky as equal?
There isn't beauty in this place, as we are all aware. It isn't friendly and warm. It doesn't hold us and comfort us or protect us. Even the same sun that gives us life will burn our skin before it dries us up only on its own way to its cold violent death.
All that can give us comfort is only anybody who also understands this knowledge. Who is that but these horrible people who cause us so much pain? The people who we watch be cruel and mean and selfish are the only ones on whose understanding we can depend.
Who can walk us though our inescapable fates but our sad companions with the same fate. We forgot this. or maybe we never knew it.
Maybe we never realized the importance of the humanity around us. Of our humans. Of our people.
You and I, people, we are all we have. Us. Our dysfunctional, egotistical, shallow-minded, selfish, arrogant, asshole neighbors. It's all we have!
We can't spend our time in judgment or hatred or condemnation. I can't hate you. You are my only possible hope besides myself, and I've realized, in myself, I have only one person who understands me...myself. I don't have time for that.
The only escape from a life of emptiness and sorrow is had by embracing the only beings we can openly and honestly say are imperfect.
Remember that in all of each other we find the only comfort we could ever have.