How To Make A Mark On The World

It’s not easy to find some giant-themed type of thing in life that could be a great life achievement.

Even those people that get those, have their highs and lows.

It’s like temporary fame.

Or being the champion of the world in something.

You get your name on the front of cereal boxes.

But 40 years later, just as dependable as clockwork, no one will even know you.

Just like no one knows my Dad.

A hero that lived and died before the internet.

Do an internet search on him, nothing.

Nothing to see here.

Plus he is, or would be old.

That makes him irrevelant.

There should be a way that even the highs AND the lows are valuable.

And not that a person would have to be lucky and die during a high, so that their life would have been great, or worth it.

If they died during a low, then they are screwed?

It’s just that when you get my age, you look back across and through life, and realize how common it is.

How common… every… single… day… is.

Surely the creator must have wanted something more than this.

And each new day also comes close to being the same.

With it’s tasks and to do lists.

You gotta eat at about the same time each day.

That uses up or wastes that part of the day.

Then you gotta shower, shave, travel to work, and do all of that common, boring, everyday stuff.

How does that move life forward?

You do that every day, and just look older, one day after another.

You eventually get good at putting on a show of incompetence and suffering.

As you stumble along with age.

If the world is like a stage, maybe that is where the value is.

In putting on a good show.

In laying there and crying and being tossed around in the world.

Great and worthwhile drama.

And even the common things.

Just sitting here picking my nose.

There must be some way that even that is viewed as being on track.

Even if I pick it imperfectly.

And get boogers on the front of my shirt before I can eat them.

There must be some way that even that is absolutely spot on.

Some say that when a person dies, their entire life flashes before their eyes, and it all makes sense.

That all of it is great beyond our understanding.

That all of it is so that we can learn to Love, and gain knowledge.

I’m for that.

It isn’t easy to stand on tiptoe one’s whole life though.

To always be spot on.

And have the missed and absent skills that come with old age.

So, let me get this straight.

People get worse as they age.

Worse at balance, worse in strength, worse in hearing, worse in seeing, worse in thinking, worse in keeping their undershorts clean, etc.

And all of THIS is the ideal for that time and role in life?

Great. God wants me here so that I can set a new speed record.

The record for the slowest ability to function.

Maybe God wants that missed booger on the front of the shirt to be there just exactly as it is.

You can’t go for caviar looking like that.

But who cares.

I’d rather be real and live close to the earth.

Close to the land.

Than standing on tip toes all day and looking like a statue to pretense and falseness.

How stingy of me to try to stand so tall over the grave below, and not offer myself to the ants and worms.

For their thanksgiving.

Their table is set.

When some turkey dies.

In a different way, it is a relief NOT to be known.

What a relief to be not known, though.

To be like those Egyptians so many thousands of years ago.

That no one knows anything about.

Unless it was the most simple-minded, stone age type of neanderthal equivalent that carved their name into stone.

Look at the neanderthal, they arrogantly said, as they worked on their computers of the time, and he sat there drueling, slobber coming out of his mouth, chiseling on a rock.

The only rock with a name that remained after all those years.

That proved that AT LEAST HE lived.

Or the turtle that sunk in the mud and died.

It became a fossil and delighted generations of scientists.

The fossil, the mud of the fossil is a testament to its life.

Yes it made its mark.

Or even fossilized dinosaur dung.

Let’s give it a fancy name, let’s call it a coprolite to make it sound valuable and elegant.

To make it much more than it is.

Or was.

And let’s knock ourselves out studying and valuing it’s ingredients so that we can know what that dinosaur ate.

While we disregard the dinosaurs of people that still stand living.

Vegetarian people standing there at lunch grazing on greens.

How To Make A Mark On The World Before You Flippin Croak. By Preston Flatt

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