Clarvoyance

I try to run, outrun this flood, this torrential river, pursuing me, engulfing me, drowning me- Life! I claw myself out, make progress, see ahead- clarvoyance.

To do this I must decend to the depths, so that I can run on a solid surface. To elevate myself I must fall; I must drown to escape the crushing waters.

And I see, that glimmer, that shining hope beyond the myst and darkness, that something beyond the infinite which is our inner illumination. That is my sight.

Then, a gust from behind; I feel it coming before it hits, an echo of pain, a feeling that something dreadful is coming, like that static feeling before lightning, like contractions before a birth. I know that reality is about to take my feet from under me, undermine my progress. The river catches up. Did I slow down, did my sense of dread at the impending river cause me to falter, or did the river just gain speed? I am undone. I am again swamped in its confusion, mundanity, animalistic frivolity- meaninglessness. I have to start all over again, I must find my feet again and ramble on.

To do this I must decend to the depths, so that I can run on a solid surface. To elevate myself I must fall; I must drown to escape the crushing waters.

And so I escape to dark abstraction, a time of complete oblivion, but once I have passed through this night, a night more confusing than even the meaningless river, then I can move on once again. In the time that it takes me to decend life has moved on without me, I gain nothing, no understanding because the river is crippling my every attempt at peace and unity. I am caught in a perpetual cycle, futility. No matter how I struggle I can go nowhere. Perhaps I would do better to take the opposite, yet equally obstinantly defiant stance in refusing to join the river. What would happen if I were to decend and then plant my feet; let the river pass me by entirely. Could I stand long enough while the glacier melts, while a world of water flows past me? Perhaps I am not drowning thoroughly enough! So I have two choices:

I can remain in my cycle of defeat in which I try to outrun the river, or I can lie on the river bed and let the water move on while I dream of someday reaching that inner illumination, the light at the end of the tunnel which is actually myself...