The Small Stuff

I am a picture, not a camera.  If I were a camera, I’d show you what you are doing.  Instead, I am still, almost blinded by the flash of life as it explodes in front of me.  Inanimate, I can only stare as the past becomes the present, and fades, out of my peripheral understanding, into the future.

At one time, I may have been glued into an album, but I’ve come undone, and the winds of time and change pick me up and hurl me about, like a dumb staring cow in a tornado.  And, like the turbinate bovine, as I’m spun and storm-tossed, a universe convulses around me, but I understand nothing.

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Why am I even here?  I change nothing, everything changes me, yet, somehow, I remain the same.  Already, I’ve amassed a lot of “I’s”, but, with a nod to Gertrude Stein, there isn’t any “me” here.  I see what passes in front of me, but only that, and strain as I might, the cosmos doesn’t even acknowledge my presence.

The space I occupy doesn’t merit dimension, though , by the standards of this earth, that space is considered a pretty good one.  Comparisons, which substitute for absolute measures of self, show that I eat better food than most, the roof over my head sheds water, more than billions of less fortunate people can say, and my prospects for longevity far surpass the human average, all by dint of having gotten myself born into a twentieth-century first-world country.

So why do I feel, at times, that I am merely a superfluous mote, helpless to do anything but exist, like the flapping photograph, or the stupid spinning cow?  I don’t know, but if I step out from myself, and look back in, I have to ask myself why none of my self-ascribed puniness bothers me to any great degree.

With my almost complete lack of meaning, I still get up every day, glad to be alive, knowing that Mr. Coffee is downstairs to greet me as I stumble into the kitchen, trying to not step on the contingent of ankle-rubbing cats, who apparently harbor no illusions about Big Thoughts.  They are content to find out it’s a school day and that they get to help me make the chicken sandwiches for lunches.