Existence: What the fuck is going on?

[Mudhammam]

It seems as though the more time that slips from under my feet, the more fragile I feel, everything saturated by the realization that I am either incredibly blessed or lucky---to no credit of my own---and that this blessed luck is bound to eventually burn out. My life is consumed by the thought of tomorrow, for at the moment I decide to reflect on today, all I can see is yesterday. What am I? Who am I? Where am I? Why do I find my feet on this dirt at this precise time in the history of the world? I look at my cats, the other organisms around me: what do they perceive? What do they think? I read the ancient poets and philosophers, and each, from the Sumerians to the Greeks, from the Persians to the Europeans of the enlightenment, has its distinctive voices that sing one harmony: the comical and tragic cruelty of man's plight, his futile search to find solid ground upon which to lay his head. True, many find the semblance of it in one form or another, be it wine, philosophy, science, philanthropy, and a million other tasks that humans set themselves upon in the name of higher purpose, whether that be identified as sensual pleasure, reclusive retreat, a life of virtue, or any other manner of living a person finds suitable. For myself though, I feel that the truth will set me free... yet what is the truth, and why does it matter? Is the idea of truth and/or my obligation to it confined to the illusion that makes up the better part of my human experience?

What does it mean to exist? Nothing is static... except for that class of abstractions we designate laws and principles. Everything else is constantly in flux. The moment I say "that _____," it has already changed in time and in space. I am changing, aging, hurled along in orbit around the Sun for which I can only hope to make the journey another 50 or so times (as I would then be approaching 80), hurled through these dimensions like in a dream, the images of the past still in my mushy lump of tissue as sights and sounds that I once lived... they were real. But what are they now? Are thoughts real? Do they exist? It seems impossible to deny. But how do they exist? How does the world of solid objects with definite properties throughout this eternal succession of change exist in contrast to the world of infinitesimally small particles separated by relatively great amounts of space, though these are "simply" manifestations of energy fields dancing a reactionary tango according to universal laws that evolved, apparently, as a result of more basic laws, or perhaps a chaotic lottery, itself something of a law for potentiality; that potentiality itself only self-recognized NOW, as everything that ever happens happens now. What does it mean to say that anything around us, or in us, as it appears either to perception or conception, exists?

I don't find reality simply breathtaking and mindbogglingly messed up. I also find it terrifying. I came from nothing and to nothing I shall return, and everything around me that I can identify also appears to be nothing, for a moment later it is something slightly different, and that as well, et cetera ad infinitum. Ah, infinity. Like nothing...but everything. I see colors, smell perfumes, enjoy life immensely... but soon, and I mean soon, it will be gone. I will be gone. And none of it will ever be again within my purview of experience. Once dead, always dead. Perhaps not, and I can't say I'd necessarily mind waking up at some point in the future, but then again, I'm one of the privileged ones and I don't doubt many would find my wishes quite disagreeable. On top of that, what would it mean to be resurrected? How could I be "me"? Are we to believe that we, as conceived individual selves, lacked any existence for eternity, or that we wake up again and again in the now but without memory?

So, I presume my mind will dissolve forever and my atoms will return to the eco-system from which they came to be recycled as other products of the environment seen through the eyes and brain of... a worm, rat, a bird, or perhaps another person like me, thinking, "What the fuck is going on?"