53. To ‘carry on’ is what makes us human
“The task is almost impossible and we surely face a certain death… So what are we waiting for?” It’s a phrase that has a curious ring for me. It’s morbid for sure, but it’s heroic at the same time. It’s the stuff that leads to legendary performance. It’s what makes the true artist leap beyond any conceivable boundary on his singular way to produce something that his contemporaries aren’t even ready for. Only the future is ready for it. One little problem, namely that this future will only see him in the past, is to such a stormer nothing but a detail. He goes for it. Like a snake, he sheds his skin if needed. He climbs up the pole and at the top of it, he makes the final jump. He ‘carries on’, not because he’s mad (although his opinion about this might not be widely shared), but because he deeply cares.
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It grabs me somewhere at the bottom of my heart. It makes me stand up in the middle of a hurricane. Yep. It makes me do ‘foolish’ things. But then I feel deep inside that this foolishness is what makes a human being really human: ‘going beyond’. Transcending what is obvious. Taking the next step, right until there is no more. Drinking the whole cup.
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Dissatisfaction (in the sense of feeling frustrated) has nothing to do with this. I would even say: it only starts when dissatisfaction has no longer anything to do with it. In this sense, it may be something ‘bigger than life’. Evolution has made us want things by giving us ‘urges’. But then we come to a point where we reverently say farewell to evolution, as well as to this kind of ‘wanting’. Instead, we can put a different ‘wanting’ in place, a wanting that doesn’t come anymore as a wave from the sea, but as the sea itself.
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It’s not anymore about ‘having a goal’.
It’s about ‘being there’.
‘There’ being: beyond the goal.
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I know this is crazy by all standards. But I don’t care. It’s beyond ‘craziness’ too. So I look at it from the other side. There I see a universe that is incredibly more interesting, more beautiful, more ‘totally human’. Looking back, I see machinery, machination, machiavellism, frustration, addiction, even much more addiction, and boundless fear.
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Looking forward, I see people wo are ‘forever young’. Surely they die, but they live forever, because they live in each other, in the past, in the future, in everywhere and all times. They are not ‘me’. They are not even ‘me’ and ‘me’ and ‘me’. They are ‘Me’. And ‘Me’ is ‘You’ at the same time. The apex of caring is when ‘giving’ becomes the same as ‘going to’, ‘being there’, just ‘carrying on’ – what are we waiting for?
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Yes, I say ‘goodbye’, but I say ‘hello’ even more
to those who carry on.
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