Why is Life

Why is life so… romanticized? 

It’s not always love and hate, light and dark

surprise and adventure, happiness and sadness

sieges of castles, falls of empires

voyages and odysseys, heroes and villains

Most of the time it’s… nothing

And there’s no beauty in nothing

They say life is dreaming fancy dreams

Drinking a cold glass of water on a hot summer’s day

Or listening to a powerful orchestra

But it’s not

Most of the time it’s lying awake in your bed at night

Most of the time it’s drinking a cup of water in front of the cooler at the office

Most of the time it’s listening to nothing but silence

And I say once more, there’s no beauty in that

But I would be wrong

There is beauty

Perhaps those moments of nothing capture the essence of life the best and no one understands

Lying awake at night gives you time to sift through your deepest thoughts

Drinking a cup of water at the cooler gives you time to chat with your office mates

And silence? It’s the music we hear all our lives

The music we heard before we were born, the music we’ll hear after we die

The very fabric of the cosmos

It will drown out all joys, all sorrows, all love, all pain

All of the human experience, eventually

Into nothingness

And that’s where the beauty lies

A simple, universal truth everyone knows that provides us the utmost serenity

That because of this silence, we must sing

We must talk. We must do. We must live. 

We must… well, be human.

That is what gets us out of our beds every day

That is what gets us to brush our teeth every morning

That is what gets us to eat our breakfasts and go to our jobs and come home to our families

We don’t need to die for a king or fight for a cause

We don’t need to fight a monster or slay a giant

We just need to drown out that silence of inaction, to delay static equilibrium

We just need to do something while we’re still here.

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