Fragments

The spirit of adventure is born in hardship, and those who refuse to seek it out have never truly lived.

     

Across the gentle passage of time, change comes more slowly than often we realise unless thrust upon a great circumstance of uncertainty. Yet looking back over where we once were and where we have become, there can come a place which holds the mind affixed with an image disembodied from the cause which brought it there. Months or as many years have passed since the illusion of control sat anywhere near where I found myself standing, and in it the gradual progression has removed symptoms of its change. For better or worse, that change persisted, and in its wake we are often left without indication that anything has truly come and gone other than the triviality of events themselves. Impact and implication, without scrutiny, fall into the secondary realm that can be clouded by a dreamstate.

One morning not many days ago, I awoke with a startling awareness that I have not truly seen before. It is not as though I were any different, any more or less awake in the existential sense, no farther from where I am or closer to wherever I am going, but there was something different in the way I saw where I was in the world. To be wrapped up in something which causes you to move 5000 miles in two years, to live in four different states and nine different places, to have been able to see so much of the country and yet hold so little freedom in the ability to truly see it, a juxtaposition silently creeps up into the bowls of the subconscious.

To those who have never experienced it, it likely sounds hyperbolic or questionably sane. Yet, in absence of hindsight, what once we thought to be a road towards actualisation is in fact a symptom of that same affliction which we seek to escape.

Faced with the crippling disinterest of all that which was once held dear and so day by day moves recklessly farther into the extremes in the hopes that the familiar evocation of wonder and passion and purpose and hope one day returns. Unknowingly and unwittingly it comes to become convinced and confused by the peculiarities which bear the guise of sensibility.

A series of fragments which lie like shards of a reality both familiar and unbound from the life thought to be behind you rise into as a scene unbelievable even to the conscious mind which has watched it come and pass. A chronicle of a life observed but never truly lived, that strange sensation comes, witnessed but estranged, seen but unincorporated. Disjointed unions of a once whole fragmentation together paint a picture which by all rights bears no reason or cohesion to the sequence which gave it birth. Each second links definitely to the last, and yet forsakes absolutely the progression into what the future is expected to hold.

To realise that the hands before you have made what they hold, that the feet beneath you have taken you to where you stand, it is only unnatural from the mind's disenchanted observation that what is waking crosses the line from what is dreamt. Together or apart, those fragments tell a story, each one so neatly self contained that they cannot possibly relate. Years or months or days slip by and before you are any the wiser you wake up as someone different and know nothing of the person you thought you were to become. Instead, there is a decoherence and the question of where next you will find yourself aware.