I am not an interchangeable unit in this mass of humanity. And my life, as such, is a unique phenomenon. There has never been and will never be another who can encapsulate the entirety of my being: the thoughts I have, the emotional significance of each thought, the points of emotional vulnerability that elicit certain thoughts, the perception of senses and the ideas they generate, the code of values and system of ethics that propel my motion through life, the achievement of goals that are always changing, the experience of that moment of calm that comes with the clarity of knowing who I am.
These are aggregate aspects of me that have never existed before and will never exist after I have existed. And then again, I am not entirely myself; I am also an amalgamation of many brilliant minds who came before me, who concurrently exist with me, and many who will exist after me. And on this string of luminaries, I am a lantern. I stand in the flow of energy; neither going with the flow, nor against the flow. I stand my own. I carve my own path. While I might faulter and fail, and bruise myself, I know I have lived. And I know I have experienced. For what is life without the bruises and the failures and the emotions of sorrow and of anguish. It is a life without texture and allure.
Life should be enticing. Life must have some texture. You must feel your life; feel that you’re living. You must be seduced and intoxicated by your life. It is only the irregularities of anguish and happiness, pain and joy, contentment and desire that creates the texture of life. Like scrubbing off your dead skin cells in the shower, so should the texture of life rub against your being and reveal the emergence of a newer, more livelier being.
This is what life ought to be.
