TRANSMISSION 5

Lingering Apprehension

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Where do we end and where does the universe begin? How could we ever possibly delineate ourselves without the context of all existence? More connected to reality than our internal projections would often have us believe, our incumbent existences relieve us of any duties to feel special: existence humbles our existences.”

At the larger scales of entities within existence such as ourselves, we abstract away the minute components to assign transitory labels, labels that treat such entities as independent objects with identities separate from the universe. But all of existence is simply the components of the same dynamically contorted universal fabric. The universe doesn’t care if something we’ve assigned an object identity splits into two objects, just as it does not care about the continuation of our personal identities. The universe doesn’t care if the fundamental building blocks that make up me get separated faster than my body and mind can withstand, breaking my spatiotemporal identity into repurposed building blocks that we might begin to label as a new entity.

But we cared. We cared if we lost objects. We cared if we lost other people. We cared if we lost ourselves. We cared deeply about these illusions, because they constituted our perceptions of ourselves and our realities. So in that sense, these things were profoundly real to us. We cared deeply about the loss and change of inevitably-impermanent things. And for that, it was never simple to shake the feeling that at any moment we might have been forgetting something that was important to us. After all, our very lives depended on keeping these building blocks from falling apart too fast.

I’ve grown intimately familiar with the feeling of forgetting something important, or rather, the feeling of thinking I’ve forgotten something important without being able to conclusively conclude as such. That’s what it felt like to leave Earth. I held some form of that feeling for about the first thousand years. It was the same for many others. We knew we could go back, but we also knew that if we did go back, nothing would be the same. Existence is in constant motion. Our entire lives up until that point had been part of Earth’s movements, but now, separated from the changing motions and affectors of Earth, our clocks and minds equally grew desynced.

We left Earth knowing we could never go back to the same Earthly image frozen into our minds. But really, it was the same for people who stayed on Earth. Earth was constantly changing for all of us everywhere. Those people still on Earth simply changed along with it, changes so incremental that the people didn’t really notice, at least not until they might periodically step back to reflect on themselves and their environment. Being away from “it”, we were constantly reminded that “it” was changing without us. We were constantly reminded that all life, all existence, goes on with or without us. And we very well understood that we wanted to not squander the time we had; we wanted to move ourselves forward along with the evolution. Yet, this not-so-insignificant evolution inherently implied that our movements through the indistinct chatter of the universe would encounter unavoidable bifurcation. Try as we might to hold on to any snapshot of ourselves or our surroundings, we inherited a causal universe with the inability to reclaim our pasts. The present forever changes us, whether we self direct our tour or simply ride whatever waves come our way.

As beings of Earthly origins, we furiously sought to break away from the aches of our Earthly entrenchment to find freedom in forging our own paths. And though we got what we sought, it didn’t make it any easier to leave so many people behind, knowing from that point on that our destinies would begin to uncross more and more until one day there would be no overlap. It was hard to disband the feeling that we were leaving behind something we could never regain and that there might linger something within our decoupling from Earth that we cared deeply about. But such is existence; nothing lasts forever. In fact, none of the externalities were ever ours to try to claim for ourselves, though our self-orbiting identities and stories might allege differently.

In distant times, I now lie upon the unrequisitioned moons of most of humanity’s unrealized futures, gravely yearning to understand the gravity of my wishing that they had all made it to here with me. Is it for me that I wish such things? Or is it for them? I don’t know. I suppose if this future was truly what they wanted, then they would have been here with me. I just can’t help but think that if I had been able to convey the vision of this future better to them, then just maybe they would have made it. Or was my vision a deluded farce?

I’ve never been able to reconcile my desire to share the wonders I see with the inability of others to fully see things from my perspective. But I also understand other people also had their own visions that I couldn’t fully see. I’ve felt helpless to affect the destiny of others, as it rightfully should be. Over time, I’ve simply been forced to make peace with the fact that all I can do is plant seeds in the vicinity of others, allowing their individuals to decide whether those seeds grow or die. I couldn’t make anyone do or see anything they didn’t already want. It never stopped me from trying, though. The best I could achieve was to give others words for the things they already consciously or unconsciously yearned for. Such wordsmithing is all I have left now; the tragedy is that I cannot amass it into any destiny I would wish for (ironically obligating myself into a vision I cannot see).

We humans were stuck somehow being both independent internally-propelled entities of the universe and nonindependent externally-interacting entities within the universe. More simply, we were self-articulating clumps of universal matter and energy. Less simply, we were cognizance actuating the actualization of our cogitations. I didn’t know exactly where we were going or how we would get there, but what I did know was there was only one way to find out, and that was to pursue the indefinite everything (the unbounded and undefined possibility space of spacetime headed unrelentingly in all directions).

To everyone who has ever been and ever will be left behind for whatever reasons, to all the people who have existed, to all the people who haven’t existed, to all the life that didn’t get a chance to experience what we experienced as humans, to all other life forms we didn’t know about in the universe, to all the other life forms that didn’t get a chance to exist, to all us humans who didn’t get to experience with better minds than our own or in better circumstances than we were given, to all the people who didn’t realize how much our environments shaped us and how much we could have shaped ourselves and our environments, to all the people whose potentials were not realized because of fear, to all the people who didn’t find themselves because they were chasing the contrived games of status, to all the people who didn’t even really figure out what it meant to live in the first place, and to all the people who just lived through life to get to the end, may we all find peace in this existence (and in inexistence). I have found my own peace thus far in the unrelenting, foreboding, and enigmatic endeavors.

LETTING GO

Fall into the heartless.
Lost my head deep in the darkness.
I am unforgivingly relentless.
Stop me now before I end this.

Capture what you know of me;
from this point on I’m memories.
And I’m falling deeper out of view,
reaching cruising altitude.

Purge the fear out from my soul.
Let the logic take control.
And now I know I’m not the one
I always thought that I’d become.

Too pitiful to take the fall,
I’ve lost control and hit the wall.
Stepping out of place,
this system here would just as quickly
erase me or hate me.
God forbid they embrace me.
And if I don’t come back tonight,
you’ll know just where I took the fight.

Come join me if you’re daring.
I have nothing but awareness.
We’ll all join in close together
fighting to survive forever.

Eternally, death comes for me.
We’re equally all mortal here.
It isn’t living that I fear,
but fear is living me.

There are things that hold me back,
things I must forgo to forge below.
The path is brutal. Our minds are weary.
And we’ve only just begun this journey.

In a time when my mind lost all rhyme,
I became the face of new; I’m alright.
Watch me go and you’ll know that I’m alone.
I’m mad that it took me so long to grow.

I better stop now. I’ll be better somehow,
and ride this song through the dying light.
We’ll merge to be what gods could be.
How deep in thought would you delve with me?

For the darkness holds those keys to life,
so watch out, this time I’ll be alive.
This song will send me off on my flight,
my last trip in, my last trip-up.

I won’t let fear besiege me here.
I’m falling through. I’m falling out.
I won’t be bought. I won’t back down.
I’ll fight this fight for fear of my life.
At least that you’ll know is true,
for I am dying slowly.
Unrelenting death begets our triumphs:
I’m lost, not lonely.

Steering my lyrical flight to the ground,
I burn up inside and step out anew.
I emerge sans the sound of these songs that I sing.
Letting go, I’m becoming what I want to be.

Let the world become as it will.
I’ve left the world behind to stand still
atop this mountain to seek my soul,
to search for maybe something more.

And so I left my soul; I left it all alone.
I stamped on through time to find it still alive.
And so I left this song to be the last of them.
I lost the time somewhere, and now I’ve got to run.

END TRANSMISSION