Neither Life Nor Writing Are Fair

When you spoke yesterday of Life having plans for you or, for that matter anyone, you were aware how the trope not only presupposes some master plan or outline, doing so pushes the trope over the edge of metaphor and into at least one fallacy.  

That one fallacy is the notion of Life having any agenda beyond continuing its presence in a particular form. There are other fallacies, to be sure, one of them dealing with its essential fairness, another being its relative benignity.  Wherever "out there is," it is mostly jungle.

Once you address the question, What is the meaning of life?, whether to yourself or a group, you effectively are tithing to philosophers and or religionists.  That one question offers unlimited potential for explanations.  When you used the term, you were doing so in the context of past actions you undertook seeming to begin patterns of causality with which you would intersect at some future time.

You also also intended the meaning to include the fact of ongoing causality such as relationships, coming to an end, leaving you to somehow fill in the void by initiating new relationships or creating forms of causality to distract you from the loss.

Given your age, your status as an orphan is no surprise, least of all to you. You think of your parents with some regularity, dream of each with frequency, and dwell on ways you might have been a better son, the better to inform your ways of dealing with those you encounter on a regular basis in person and, to stretch the point, how you might better emerge in your written work.  

This has meaning for you because of the way you reckon you did ask to be born, based on the way you swam fastest to meet the egg.  You did not ask to be any kind of writer, but when you realized you wished to become one, you were responding to some internal force or forces.

The two individuals who were your closest friends are with you now only in memory, creating yet another kind of orphanhood.  Each of them appears, from time to time in your dreams, as does your beloved dog, Sally, gone these two-and-a-half years.  You realize how fragile things are when, after waking up at the appearance of a parent or a friend or sweet Sally in your dream you realize you could have prolonged the visit a  bit longer by not awakening with such a spirited sense of joy.

You look for ways you might have been a better friend in order to share the friendships you cherished for so many years.  Each was a significant writer, their work and off-the-page personality intersecting with you in ways you continue to hope are manifest. You will undoubtedly bring another dog into your life, wondering as you bond with her or him how you might have been a better friend to Sally.

Tricky though it may be to deal with such concepts as Life being a force that, once having launched you, has left you on your own to fend and forage as you will, you cannot help finding purpose, connection, and the solace of dreams within it.

You did, indeed, ask to be born.  However it may be fallacy to believe so, once you were born, writing was thrust upon you.  In writing, you see parallel lines as a thematic design for story.  Thus the parallel lines of you being caught between the rock of Life and the hard place of writing.  Neither is fair, not life, certainly not writing.

As you are in Life, you are also an orphan in writing.  Your two mentors are gone.  Writers who lived and died before you were born are gone.  Some still had Life during your time here.  Indeed, you have met some of them, concluding how neither Life nor writing ever pretended to be fair.

An idea starts blinking somewhere in your consciousness.  Before you are aware of it, it has become a comet, sweeping toward you in its orbit.  You grab onto it as it passes, being yanked by its velocity into the chill of space, where you hang on, vulnerable, determined not to let go.