burn baby burn

Here is a short portrait of myself. It is three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, and I am slumped against the side of my bed, staring at a blank white wall. I have been sitting here for half an hour. A voice somewhere within says listen to me, and closely. Ben, someday soon you will die. You are running out of time. What is forty years, or fifty, or a hundred? Ben, you are going to die.

I know that already. Out of all the things passing and gone and lost in my life, this knowledge is the single constant.

Run, child, run. Live while you are alive.

But what am I supposed to do? Who am I supposed to become?

Silence. The voices are all mine, anyways. There's a God somewhere out there, I think, but he's seldom so morbid. This constant restlessness, undirected urgency -- is this what it feels like to be alive and mortal? Twenty years in, maybe a third of the way into my productive years. I should have this figured out by now, but I don't. Twenty years training for some unknown purpose, or even worse, getting so flabby and undisciplined that even when I find it, I'll trip and fall on my way out the door. I have to find it soon. I'm running out of time.

I am imago dei -- made in the image of the eternal God -- but even so: we only live once.

So I'm drawn to the passion of others like... oh, I don't know. Like moth to flame, to use the cliche that leaps immediately to mind. I don't know what the moths have to do with anything, but the flame -- oh, flame. Flickering orange and amber and red, raging against the dark, dancing in the fatal wind. I want to burn brightly. Everyone dies, everyone is forgotten. There are seven billion of us on Earth, and beyond that only infinite darkness. How could it be otherwise? We struggle and love and fight and win or lose, we will die. But before that, some of us will be incandescent.