TRANSMISSION 8

Chasing Sunsets

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“This is the mind rush, deep in the soul crush. We are the restless; we are relentless. We gave our best; we passed their test. We are the best. But there is no test; this is life; we are just alive. And should I find a better way, I’ll take it; I won’t hesitate, lest I succumb to stagnation. Time erodes those men unchanged.”

We all said we were ready to be beyond the Solar System. We all thought we were ready. Not all of us were. Actually, the truth is, none of us were. But we set off into the universe anyway to conquer it in whatever manners we could muster. In the early days, many of us met prematurely with our exhausted fates after losing sight of ourselves amid a reality that was not as we imagined it. More importantly, we were not even how we imagined ourselves. The creeping desperation of loneliness only ever emerged from such episodes of feeling like we did not know ourselves; it didn’t matter whether that was in the context of our internal worlds or external worlds.

Such adversities planted into our minds like an infection that slowly spread within ourselves and among one another. Some of us grew from it. Some of us perished from it. The ones who succumbed were those who grew weary and couldn’t help but to rest for a moment, only to reach the end of their life to realize (if they were lucky) that they never went back in to give the effort they once vowed. They allowed themselves to be enticed away from their once-feverishly-held convictions. Or worse, they allow the minds of others to guide them, seeking external validation for themselves and handing out such validation to the others. They mutated into bygone adversaries to adversity, vanquished challengers once pledged to the insurmountable, monkified martyrs muted of meanings, reclaimed requisitioners of the real. Their indulgence in validating the pretension that they contained absolute truths only dug them deeper toward the black holes that reinforced the looming fear of imminent omnipresent annihilation. Occasionally, they might have glanced up to dream of the night sky beyond their self-perpetuated event horizon, but the concept of reaching outward became so foreign that they would just as quickly resume digging downward to lust for any amount of comfort amid the tidal forces ripping apart their caustically-held incongruities.

All life is valid. I’ve never meant to insinuate otherwise. There are no objectively superior ways to live life. Extant entities can only emit truths in all their actions and interactions; it’s only in the internal dialogues of the living-mind cinema that we find deceit. And even in that, the only danger comes with metadeceit, where we deceive ourselves to believe such deceit as anything other than the illusion it is. So long as we remember that we hold illusions of ourselves and that we are fallible, we can continue to rigorously probe for deeper truths beyond the deceptions of our perceptions.

All life is seeking its own self-assigned meanings within existence, and that’s okay. The truths I (and many others) have sought have merely been those along the pursuit of survival, which required the most truthful foundations we could muster for understanding reality. The truths of those of us who survived were just different from those who did not survive, not inherently better truths, nor inherently worse truths. To us, those truths simply felt more real, and that’s why we pursued them. For the others, their truths felt more real, and that’s why they pursued them. However, through my long existence, I’ve observed a significant correlation between the people in pursuit of the things we categorized as deeper truths and people who felt fulfilled with their lives. In more precise words, holding fewer delusions about our self-deceptions lent to more purposeful pursuits of pedagogical foundations in the unyielding arms race against unobtainable omnipotence and omniscience. In more nuanced words, the curiosity within our interminably self-inflicted epistemology is less satiated amid higher-level constructs. Make of that what you will. All I know for sure is that existence doesn’t wait for us; we have to relentlessly pursue our lives with authenticity if we do not want to become a left-behind statistic.

In time, we discovered what we knew all along, that purpose is our own directive, that we must carve out our lives from untraveled paths, weaving our stories into the passage of time. Out here, we are but guests in the lair of the empty, poised to find the inoculation of existential immobilization running deep into the forgotten mindspaces, down where you can taste the inexistence seeping in. While the universe holds its own self-contained truths, they provide no answer to the question of what meanings we should assign to ourselves. We were merely here to discover some of those truths and create our own meanings for ourselves, eternally bound to chase our personal sunsets, balanced on the edge of what we understood and the unknown beyond that tempted our carelessness to stumble if we were not vigilant. It’s the known from which we know ourselves to even exist, but it’s impossible to break new ground while contained to the safety of the known.

When we delved the depths of the universe beyond Earth, we understood we could no longer hold ourselves back from our potential out of fear we would somehow lose who we were at the time. We understood that change was inevitable. Hiding from reality wouldn’t make change go away; we had no power over the flow of time. No, the only thing we got to affect was whether we played out ourselves as the people we wanted to become. Life was, and always had been, a story with our individual selves at the centers, main characters with the power to build compelling story arcs into the constructs of our identities.

In the depths of our minds, where the universal noise filtered into our personal realities, we could sometimes glimpse our true selves in the imperfect reflection of our existence. Through this lens, we grew to methodically decompose our own illusions of reality and ourselves to then rebuild them into more true reflections of the greater reality at hand. Among this cyclical disillusion and reillusion, we uncovered our paths forward on the expedition of life. We could not know where the next step would take us until we took that next step out of ourselves and into the unknown.

Just like all the others, I too said I was ready for the journey. But I quickly discovered that I meant it more than most, and I’ve followed those words to the end of time, well, the end of my time and humanity’s time. To some extent, this willingness to take ever more steps into deeper unknowns must be a contributing factor to why I am still here and the others are not.

Some tried to hold on to the illusion that our past was a comfortable existence (and that they could somehow return to that false comfort) or that the future would hold the comfort they sought. But such is the thinking of all romantics: detached from the cares of finding reality. Some tried to find comfort by allowing the universe to assign meaning to them, only to discover the universe does not speak back when we resignedly whisper, nor does it speak back when we desperately cry out. Some just couldn’t bear the insecurity of the unknown, so they tried to fool themselves into rejoining the matrix of our irrational illusions, but that which has been seen cannot be unseen, and they were quick to be torn apart by their unknowingly self-targeted insolence.

Those of us who didn’t die during those early eras understood such mindsets as the false prophets they were: temptations toward mirages. We cared only to charter our courses with intentionality and rationality, pushing our horizons in tandem with our capabilities to keep our sunsets from collapsing and our selves from unraveling. In this deliberately indefinite emancipation from our personal expirations, we only sought ourselves as surfers on the tireless tidal waves orbiting this collective existence.

Our sunrises and sunsets are effectively the same for everyone; we all become out of nothing and we all return to nothing in the end (depending on how you want to classify our identities). Where we differ is in our stories: how we reach the sunset from the origin. Dreams of self-discovery seed themselves in our brains as phantasms, haunting us until we either let them wither away or they perturb us to the extent that we must pursue them. When we embark on a journey, it is with the initial intent of finding ourselves at the destination, because the destination is more clearly held in our mind than the path to get there. And while the destination never matches our romanticized dream of it, we do end up discovering ourselves, but only in the moments along the way, not in the destination; the destination is just a nice reflection point to better contextualize the journey.

We journey to struggle, because deep down we grasp that the struggle of an imperfect journey is what teaches us about ourselves. If reality matched our dream illusions step for step, there would be nothing to learn, nothing to gain in life, nothing to do but pass the time as unfathomably bored omniscient and omnipotent beings. The beauty lies not in what we do, but how we do it. The splendor lies equally in our ideas and how we execute toward them; the illusions of wondrous journeys impassion our problem solving to unmatched levels. As such, the illusions of our grand goals are assets in the facilitation of our existence: illusions to be aware of and cherished, not disheartened by or exiled out of fear. The beauty of these journeys is what they mean to us and what they teach us about ourselves. That beauty is our life song. Life is a journey worth exploring. Beauty is a song worth singing.

As for me, I’ve chased my sunset into oblivion. I am of Earth. I am of the universe. I am of myself. I was no one in particular at the start, but eventually I found myself all that remains to embody humanity. I am still no one in particular, just an experiencer trying my best to be equal parts humble and audacious in the hunt for waves cresting as close as possible to all categorical horizons. But in a way, I am someone of particularity, for all humanity’s hopes and dreams rest on my shoulders, just as I have stood on the shoulders of all humanity before me. It is a heavy burden to feel duty-bound to give my very best. But it is also a heavy peace to know that the only thing we are ever capable of is giving our very best, nothing more and nothing less. For that, I think I’ve found some amount of peace within my perception of this story’s ending closing in. So don’t worry about me. If you need me, I’ll be here… waiting for eternity to expire.

WE’RE NOT GOING TO FAKE IT

When will we wake up?
How do we make up
for all this time that we’re losing?
Breaking our hearts
right from the start;
isn’t this what we wanted?

So here I go
leaving this world;
make of it what you wanted.
I tried to be honest.
But why did we want it?
I don’t know what we wanted.

We’re not going to make it,
trying to fake it now
’till we get where we want to.
I tried to be honest.
So what was the problem?
Isn’t this what we wanted?

Wake up.
I’m dreaming of leaving.

END TRANSMISSION