I don’t care, and I don’t have a mind complicated enough to think that what I care about matters.
That is the surrender required.
Could you have an argument with the weather that matters or changes anything?
“This year there have been too many clouds. We were robbed of a summer.”
Who’s doing the robbing?
You and your silly thoughts.
Ego is big and bold enough to make you think you’re right about aliens or you could levitate off the ground.
It imagines it has more power than nature.
And what is ego?
Is it the same one as “egotistical?” Not really. That one is something simple people like to hurl at each other like rocks.
On a small level, ego is a simple thought of conditions deserved when it’s widely known that nobody deserves anything and nothing is ever fair.
As if a bird could approach a bush with a thought that the bush owes it a berry.
The bird arrives and the berry is either there or not.
A bird, unlike a human, does not make up a story about its pursuit of berries.
Ego says you are a story unto yourself – that you are somehow separate from the rules and flowings of bird, bush and berry.
Separate from nature itself.
But you are nature, and your story is pure mental fabrication, confabulation . . . artificiality.
Weirdly, that includes your name, your home town, your job, your identity.
You have none of it, just like the bird.
You have moments of berry or no berry.
Pursuit or no pursuit.
And yes, those are strung together in your mind if only to lead you to likely food another day.
Memory for the sake of survival.
But memory for the sake of self-aggrandizement?
No. You never had any story like that.
Think of what little room there is for stories on a grave stone.
The famous poet of our era – the bumbling drunk who made magic with lots and lots of words – put two words on his grave stone: Don’t try.
That’s an instruction for writing a poem.
Give up and just let it out, like a bird approaching a bush.
Deny the righteousness of your grand narrative, and simply allow a little of your life force to spill onto a page.
What could be more absurd and delightful?
If this ego thing is pushed aside, a few words can be wondrous pointers to half truths.
Whole truths being inaccessible by letters.
So treat each minute like the adventure it is.
Understand that what you think matters is wild speculation.
And if you cling to it, you sabotage your experience.
Adopt the idea that you’re going to die tonight so you can live clearly today.