Was just thinking about what I wanted to call the shape of my life. And how I was thinking about how lives are shaped. What twists and subterranean paths, and sudden stops the shapes of lives can take. People have been living out strange and amazing lives, whose shapes to an outside observer, make take on something that may resemble a knotted, pile of offal. stinking and deplorable except for its tedious conceivability. A life that may feel watery, as if it weren’t material in the sense of something having its own distinctive edge, as liquid flowing in the easiest path. Some lives may shine brightly, and burn so violently as to extinguish the lives of those around them. Some lives may appear to have all the qualities of a known sum, and remain as such for the duration, save for the very last moment, when some lacuna in the foundation is uncovered, peered into, and understood to be a branch into entirely different sections, and must therefor re-contextualize the whole thing, dizzyingly, astonishingly, completely.
Humans develop a sense for grasping and palpating a life’s shape. But as long as humans have been living, they have been finding novel ways to live. Novel feelings that come from experiencing radically alien circumstances, providence of an ever more unfurling and complex world. As we have created habit, formed routines, and consolidated traditions that have laid out familiar paths for humans to inhabit, these life shapes take on patterns, and perhaps even lend themselves to be ascribed tangible value, and possibly even meaning. But as our ancient ancestors may have perceived, as they clawed meager subsistence into life shapes so abbreviated but nonetheless striking in their temerity and overwhelming pathos, there’s always something you may not have expected, unseen, and headed directly towards you. All the planning and reading of signs, and carefully executed maneuvers, are but sophistry, perfectly suited for our entertainment, and none the potenter. Being alive means living with the plausibly deniable knowing that most things are beyond our control.
Sometimes I wonder about what my life shape will be. And how I can use my talents to make it at least try and resemble something that I could call…meaningful. I don’t thing what I’ve done with my life would make me very proud to explain it to someone else. Other people’s lives seem so much more interesting and meaningful to me. More graspable because they feel more familiar than my own, which upon waking most mornings, tends to feel more and more inscrutable. Maybe changing a few of my daily circuits could do the trick. I would like to be more involved in trying to create beautiful things. Moments of humanity that I can look back at and hold in my palms, like they were proof that I did something that made a positive difference, instead of feeling like my burning daylight is so much flash in so much pan.
TABLEMOLD 