When I was younger, things would ossify for months at a time until I shook them up. Now it’s years. Maybe decades. My “home office” has been here, is this room, arranged as it is, for how long now? Five years? Six? And the room and arrangement before that—the same.
So many tens of thousands of hours sat at this desk, and tens of thousands of hours at the one before that.
— § —
I have been contending with a sense of impending doom since my divorce.
Sometimes it’s stronger, sometimes weaker, but I haven’t ever really been able to shake the feeling that tragedy is forever just a few moments away—that the world is about to come crashing down around me.
No, I don’t think this is the sort of thing that you see a therapist about. I think it’s really that I came to terms with reality as I was getting divorced.
Once you understand that all things must end, you understand that all things end quickly, because time is always, in the end, gone in an instant the instant it is gone. The past isn’t endless and long as the numbers would seem to suggest; all of the past, all of history, is a flash, a moment, a single shard of reality—the one right before this one.
Anything time bound doesn’t really exist, and never existed, once “now” is over, and now always has a length of zero as you examine it retrospectively.
We’re all as good as dead and everything we love is as good as gone. It’s always happening right now; it’s in process and there is zero time left.
— § —
All the things that you do in life, from working to cleaning to hobbies to sleeping, come to seem absurd as you age.
Because they are absurd. But at the same time, so is doing nothing.
They say life is suffering, and that may be true, but life is also absurd, surreal, nonsensical.