Life in an irreversible escape
.
The truth is this: we are not only travelers through time.
We are also witnesses to erosion.
Life rarely breaks things in a single blow.
It loosens them, slowly—almost patiently—like something that never rushes because it never loses. It takes in small portions. A name. A place. A certainty. A season. It subtracts quietly, day after day, as if the ordinary itself were a lesson in the bitter craft of letting go.
And yet, something in us insists.
We keep running.
We keep building.
We keep loving.
Even when we know the wave is coming.
Even when we know its nature is to reach us.
Perhaps that is what makes existence so strange—and, at times, so beautiful: not the promise of permanence, but the stubborn refusal to live without meaning. We keep forging significance inside what is temporary. We keep planting tenderness in unstable soil.
The human heart is an architect working among ruins, and still it raises bridges. Still it writes poems. Still it offers generosity, affection, quiet care. Still it is moved by a sunset—by a dawn washed in color—by the innocent song of a bird or two, as if the world, despite everything, still deserved reverence.
Until, somewhere along the path, the flame surrounds us.
Not as punishment.
Not as tragedy.
But as conclusion.
And then what we call “the end” is not an explosion.
It is a final pause.
A retreat.
A soft closing of the door of motion.
What remains is what has always been waiting beneath the noise of the hours: the dense silence—where memories thin into impressions, and impressions drift, carried by unseen winds across the immensity of the cosmos.
And perhaps it is there, inside that silence, that life finally tells the truth about itself.
Not an inventory of victories or defeats.
Not a balance sheet of gains and losses.
But a brief flare of consciousness moving through the vastness.
A lucid moment in which we exist, we love, we lose, we remember—
and with no guarantees at all, we still dare to call it meaning…
even though permanence, deep down, is only the most elegant form of desire.
At last, the welcoming silence
Beautiful thoughts. One idea of yous, though, just “sparked” another one in me:
Perhaps consciousness is not always just a “brief flare moving through the vastness..” To make the mind-fire metaphor fit don’t we also need to posit some mechanism by which flaring (rapid oxidation, in the language of chemistry) i.e. the rapid release of heat as energy in exhange w/oxygen intake, occurs either at either random intervals or with some regular intent or causation?
Perhaps another poetic (but purposeful) depiction of the consciousness of nature (of which our minds probably are just one instance) lies in its “smouldering” (pre- or un-conscious) state.Here potentially combustible elements lay dormant, or right below the level (Gladwell’s Tipping Point) at which ignition can occur. Similar to burning materials then, the substrate of consciousness requires something like heat, fuel and oxygen, but in psychological/neurological terms, showing releant relationships.
Let’s say the ‘fuel’ of consciousness – the necessary stuff that intensifies and ebbs in oscillating patterns (a.k.a. “brain waves’) are the electrochemical ‘signals’ we observe as enegy packets sent and received between individual neurons. These signals – free enery — supply the ‘heat’ for both synthesising and and decomposing packets in an accelerating frequency (called “thought” or perhaps “concentration”). Which leaves us to identify the “oxygen” part of the consciousness-process and here allow me to be whimsical and call that thing ‘spirit’ — literally “breath” as in aspiration, respiration, and conspiracy. So together, the usually dormant (unconscious) mind smoulders, glows in a most subtle and durable way, until sparked into the more active, higher chemical-energy state we call consciousness. Consciousness flares up intermittently when we are awake but the vast majoity of time (even while awake) the mind lulls, drifts into a restive day-dream-like low energy pattern- perhaps to conserve fuel (spirit) but also it is only during the unconscious periods when creativity can occur. Ideas (not fully formed, but merely nacent, embryonic) come together, get “realized” into conscious, get “re-membered” from constituent parts , usualy when our “conscious awareness” (ego, intention, theory, etc,) is quiescent.
Creativity requires a low low energy level, where the smouldering of the mind is not all that much different from the background hum of the rest of the natural universe. The flaring, the ideational asipiration of consciousess, is relatively rare simply because it requires a rather extended interval of dormanvy – of calm quietude.
Consciousness (the flkaring) cannot be The end-in-itself, anymore than the sun’s rising is not it’s “purpose” which is merely, and naturally, To Exist. Consciousness is a species of mind, but it’s not the Main Event. Other states (like say, memory/nostalgia) are just as important to the whole pattern or life-cycle of our species, and of Life itself.
Similarly we sleep (intentionally unconscious-ize-ourselves) not “in order to enhance our awaken state” but perhaps exactly the reverse: we are awake, work, hunt, eat, procreate, etc IN ORDER TO sleep & dream well. The brief fire serves the persistant ember. I think.
Anyway.. Obrigado, Samuel, por essa jornada instigante, estimulada pela sua consciência peculiar (especial). Bons sonhos, meu amigo!