As we move through these cycles of time, these peaks and lows, times of great excitation and times of abject desolation, there are moments I find it easy to hold on to my faith that we humans can collectively wake up in time to restore balance to this earth; and there are also moments when I think that, in an infinitely expanding universe which has no limit, we may be one of its so-called failed experiments, one of those almost conscious colonies of beings who got pretty damn close to breaking out of that idiotic ego-trap but didn't quite make it in time. I think when we hit close to this variety of despair we may be compelled to just give up, to say "fuck it" and lapse back into whatever self destructive patterns we had been holding off on when we were feeling much more hopeful.
Yet I think that this is innately the wrong answer, regardless of the outcome on this tiny hunk of rock and metal sagely spinning through the wild abyss. After all, all things are just as quick to die as they are to live, and that does not make it the sensible option to give up on the latter simply because the former is also inevitable.
We can choose to accelerate our own death or we can infuse our lives with the greatest passion to be exactly what we are: alive, living and breathing and existing because there is no reason that we are here, except that we are the difference between being and not-being. We ARE here to BE, not to surrender in passivity to a slipslide into what we are not.
Live life richly. Live life boldly. Live life knowing that there are many terrible things that should be feared, and rightly resisted, but do not allow that fear to consume or overtake our capacity to love and give.
Live anyway, and live vibrantly. Live fighting to change the world, even though the world might someday perish, because doing the right thing can't be conditioned upon the unknowable outcome of doing that right thing.
Live knowing that we are meant to grow. To transform. To conceive of things greater than we are currently able to comprehend. Live understanding that our actions are not performed in a vacuum, that they are so inextricably interconnected with others, that we are in a sort of union that cannot be broken, even as we forget and remember, remember and forget, time and again, in ecstatic communion, yet unknowing, unthinking, growing and falling, getting up, sinking down, but always learning.
We are not meant to fall down and stay forever on our knees.
And so we must rage, rage against the dying of the light.