Random Steps

I am here only for my edification. I have no way to force anyone else to sit in my place or do what I say. Whether joy or sorrow accompanies these words, only I know. I have no path to make or map to follow. I wander.

With no destiny or destination, I have the universe available to me to observe, with limited access and a single planet on which to make my observations. My desires do not include expanding human knowledge, only to enjoy the wonders before me. I wander in and out of human social circles. I learn new words they tell me, new codes to use for communications within subcultures. I stare at the sky and watch groups of water droplets and ice crystals circulate above and around me.

My nirvana, my heaven, is with me now. I do not need a tomorrow or an afterlife to make up for unhappy or painful moments in this life.

I have wandered through the lives of others, hearing their requests to participate in their versions, not mine, of what life's all about -- social climbing, sexual escapades, drug experimentation -- and see the randomness of it all giving randomness an emphasis it does not deserve. Life is random and thus random becomes meaningless, reducing the phrase to "Life is."

One said, "follow your bliss." Another said, "do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Another said, "live and let die," a revision of "live and let live." One says, "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals," while another says, "People Eating Tasty Animals."

Words. Sounds. Monkey calls. I am a fellow primate. I share this world with other sentient beings inside and outside of my species. From an extraterrestrial view, I am simply part of the biosphere we call Earth.

Why do I sit here now? Habit. I contribute nothing new to the accumulated knowledge of my species. I am observing.

I have always observed. I was not born with a innate drive to compete. I compete only when it adds to what I can observe. I am unique and yet the same as others.

To say I am ready for death is not the same as saying I am ready to die. I have achieved all the goals I set for myself. Other goals remain but exist only in the arena of social comparisons, under the spotlight and in the view of other humans, a place I no longer need to exist. In the vernacular, I stepped off the treadmill, I stepped out of the rat race, etc., having no more need for monetary rewards and social interaction to justify my existence...except for being here, of course, typing in front of the computer screen.

Am I really here out of habit? Am I like the kid who scrawled his name on the mosaic walls of Pompeii, saying, "Andronicus was here," arbitrarily preserving words but not the person for eternity?

I like to write. Why I like to write, I don't know, not yet anyway. That's why I pursue the study of consciousness/ego/mind/brain, to know where in my physique rests the wiring that prevents my actions from being totally random. To do so, I read the biological/philosophical studies of others, not bothering to make studies of my own, because again I have no social need or drive to compete with other scientists or philosophers in the "publish or perish," foundation/grant grabbing subculture. They perform the research for me for free (at the cost of a book purchase or Internet access, at least).

I am nothing special. I was born with no statistically outstanding traits. I hide in plain sight, being myself, a human, in a world awash with seven billion others like me, available for categorizing under bell curves and trend analysis studies using my habits, which I repeat under the misconception that I like randomness.

I write because I know that I want to live forever, despite the knowledge I won't and nobody does, even though I know I do not exist except as a point in an interconnected web of living things on this planet, where even the point itself exists only as a temporary illusion, the semirandom meeting place of atoms and molecules, proven to me when I was a child and reading about a meteorite crashing through a neighbor's mother's living room and more recently reading about a young boy getting hit in the head by a pea-sized meteorite.

We think we control our destinies, and in the local subcultures in which most of us live, the illusion of control holds true, despite the uncontrollable effects of the air pollution that travels around the world produced by subcultures we've never seen or cosmic rays that pierce our bodies unknowingly.

I am the product of the universe, seen as an offspring of two primates I call parents. Some of their habits are my habits, like language, clothing and other identifiably identical subculture features. Otherwise, I have branched off in a different direction, determined in large part by my genetic and environmental heritage, which I have researched in order to know which parts of me are autonomous and which are pre-programmed and thus consciously unchangeable.

Some people believe the planet and the universe are theirs for the taking. I do not. I have no grandiose schemes or dreams. I am content being the being taking my next step within a subculture I know, using resources within my grasp and depending on a small number of other beings to maintain the illusion of my existence. I am, even though I think I am not.