When I was a child, I would lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling fan go round and round and wonder about the end. The end is a concept that has traumatized my very existence since I was a child. What is the end? I would wonder.
I wouldn’t sleep, scared that when I woke, The Earth would be drowned in an air of desolation, creeping into the null and void. I would think to myself, what if the end just happened? I began to form hypothetical scenarios to replenish my mind that was growing exhausted each day, thinking of questions that had no answers.
I filled my indocile, yet tender mind with thoughts along the lines of something like this.
Once upon a time, there was a king who- The End.
It was a bright and sunny Saturday- The End.
I told my mother about my biggest- The End.
When I was in school, I fell in love- The end.
It was this persistent feeling of not being able to be completely secure that followed me around like a lurking shadow. Someone once said that the life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living. I believe that although science urges us to counter this, we needn’t immediately dismiss it as entirely untrue, for the line separating life and death can be so blurred that we may never be able to discern where one ends and the other begins.
Life, as we know it made of these vicious cycles of love and hate, success, and failure, sorrow, and happiness. It’s unpredictable and deceptive. And amidst all these abstract thoughts and ideas, I realized the greatest truth of all.
Everything around us is nothing but a perception of our minds. Tomorrow, yesterday, forever, these are all illusions
that we use to reassure ourselves that we have more time to pick our paths, tread our own water, and save ourselves from drowning. The truth lies in the fact that all we have is right now. We have only this one moment to seize, capture, control and make our own. What is the essence of all this?
I believe it arises from that one moment, that one second that we have in our hands, which isn’t a blurred line or a chaotic delusion, but a clear, distinct image of what kind of humans we want to be.