mud

In order to have a proper existential crisis, one must begin to think of all the things they will never do, the people they will never see, the places they will never experience. And how it all does not matter, that long after one ceases to exist, these things will go on doing, these people will go on seeing, these places will keep providing experiences to the millions of others who are still breathing. And so just start running around in that hamster wheel and you'll soon be on your way to a terrifying dead end.

But is that the end? Could embracing the inevitable be a way to begin? Maybe it's the only way. Maybe we are stuck in our own timid mud until we can accept the fact that the mud is a mixture of what constitutes 70% of us and the skin of the earth. Mud seals. Mud refines. Mud heals. Mud is home.

We were the children who made mud pies. We let it ooze between our toes while throwing fistfuls at faces. There was a lightness that hardened over time. What used to be a playpen became a pit. What adhered us together ended up cracked.

Is it as simple as how we define a life? Is that the way out of the crisis? It might very well be that we'll still be stuck in the mud of missed connections, forgotten dreams, lost paths. But we can begin to see the mud as the protection that it is and ourselves as the lotus that may bloom soon enough.

Hope might be vicious. Hope might be the rope that ends up as a noose, not a ladder. Then again, hope might lift what would otherwise sink. Hope might be worth the risk.