thinktoomuch.net

Tomorrow morning I’m off to work. My first full-time job, at a wonderful company, in a wonderful city (Zurich, Switzerland), a wonderful new experience in life lies before me.

Tonight I sleep in a bed in my new temporary home (home for no more than 30 days, hopefully), in my new home town/city.

Tonight my mother sleeps in a hospital bed, in Somerset West, South Africa. A hospital that has served as a temporary home for her way too many times.

Tomorrow she’s off to the operation theatre for surgery to remove a cancer tumour. It is a grim experience, but not a new one: this is her sixth time.

Such is the rhythm of life: the hard battles we endure, the great wonders we experience, the relationships we build and break, the confusion sowed by struggles, the love found in peace. Bitter-sweet. But it is no duality, it forms a whole. In facing mortality, we see the wonder that is life.

Or is this just the existentialist in me speaking?

In a brief flurry of existence, the shooting star that is a self-aware life crawls out of a puddle, ponders Lah’s marvels, and takes a shot at living an eternal life… A tune played to an unfathomable rhythm, that can never quite be figured out. We interpret as best we can, trying to recognise a syncopation here, a fermata there, but in the end what matters is rather the creativity and passion with which you play the most beautiful tune you can. Sometimes it seems dissonant, at other times the tune simply sings.

But each individual instrument? Feeble! The true marvel is the whole orchestra. Instruments interacting, playing counterpoint, developing harmonies into cadences, in an attempt to weave a rich tapestry of living, breathing music, a performance that pulls heartstrings in ways we call divine: now those are the kinds of lives we should strive to lead.

Pretentious? Just like this post? Which turned out nothing like I anticipated…

It matters not, really. A silly little post, a couple of words thrown together and published prematurely, negligently lacking a good editing job or time to mature and develop some character, but such is life sometimes: I must go to bed, must sleep, because tomorrow I have another opportunity to contribute to the bitter-sweet tapestry of life. The light emphasises the shadow, and the shadow shows the way to the light.