We leave no shadow and hardly a trace

 

 

Subject: We leave no shadow and hardly a trace.







It’s funny to contemplate the tiny hole we will leave behind when we exit this life, hardly a ripple on the huge surface and yet so profound on ours. Out life starts out creating a big fuss, our parents are overjoyed but gradually we merge that joy into a background narcissism and embark on lives of self centred obscurity creating only tiny inconsequential ripples,  all these ripples and hardly a wave between us, we have no other way of acknowledging we were here at all. Family and a few friends will remember us  but has this raw event of our life has been hardly noticeable in the grand scheme of things. Some people may have become famous in what they do and are remembered for that but most of us are opaque, hazy creatures hardly casting a shadow.

Is that a failure or a success. Should our shadow obscure other shadows, should we dominate or should we be transparent, easily seen through perhaps inconsequential. Should our lives have consequence or should we simply accept that we like the poet Tennyson wrote in his poem “The Brook” that our mortality and the eternity of nature are strange bedfellows.

The power of our thoughts disturb this conclusion since we cannot contemplate taking such a acquiescent role whilst determined to turn over every leaf, every stone in an effort to know more and ask why. These two worlds, one of mortal decay and the other of incisive thought which runs unabated as it always has since we first opened our eye is also incompatible. This constant  trembling in our brain, this argumentative continuum, ever questioning, ever denying, refusing to give in and why, since our mortality will snuff it out in a second. All that prized knowledge, the hopes and fears of a lifetime short circuited in a moment when we become no more,  and yet we plough on reading to learn, watching to understand as if ‘understanding’ was a life force.

Perhaps it is the only ‘life force’ worth embarking upon since the ubiquity of knowledge, it’s fundamental universality will not let us down like more shallow pursuits might.