Long ago, in my high school speech class, the teacher told me to picture the audience naked to overcome my own shyness. So I did. I saw them as thirty skeletons sitting at desks, wrapped in meat, all slowly ticking towards their expiration dates. Under their skin, that’s all they were. Behind their sneering lips and contemptuous eyes were just bone, nerves, and tissue. Oh sure, they were all unique, but that loses its novelty when it’s everybody being unique. I started seeing everybody as just an organism that moves around, eats and sleeps, eventually dies, and in dying is forgotten. Just like me. Once you put that into perspective, what one of them calls you doesn’t matter at all.
The walking skeletons that work at fashion magazines tell you how to decorate your shell to improve your social status, to impress other pointless organisms and gain their fleeting respect. The glorified monkeys that make their living by pretending to be other glorified monkeys in films and television fool us into thinking their lives are glamorous and worthy of our envy. Every politician who vies for the opportunity to rule our short lives is a tangle of organs and highly compressed fluids, gases, and acids, held together by two hundred some-odd bones, set in motion by electric synapses distributed to the steak we’re wrapped in, and fueled by dissolving food that is slowly turning into, well, poop.
It’s something we all ought to be well aware of, but with that knowledge comes fatalism, if you’re not careful. The futility of it all can swallow you whole. It is the enlightenment that leads to madness. It leads to the cynical analysis of every little thing.
Sunsets may be pretty, but that's only because cloud moisture and carbon and hydrogen molecules block out the blues and greens of the spectrum, and beach sunsets are only prettier than inland ones because salt particles kicked up by crashing waves block everything except red. That’s taking it too far, I think. They’re still pretty, so enjoy them. People can be fun to spend your time with, but know them for what they are.
Remember when you were young enough to still believe that scimitar of a moon was following you as you peered at it out the backseat window of your parents' car? Like a book you've read before, or a movie you’ve already seen, you know the ending but you keep reading or watching as if you don't. Just like knowing that one day you'll die, but you keep on living as if you never will. You don't think of the moon as a scarred derelict rock in our orbit, pimpled and pockmarked, and romantic only at the vast distance we see it from. You think of it as something mystical, and you live as if you actually matter in the Grand Scheme of Things.
Well, you don’t, and in that knowledge lies freedom. Forget the weight you put on your shoulders to conform. You see, we're all on a big rock in outer space, perpetually spinning around a huge star (or a tiny one, depending on how you look at it). We don't know how we got here. We don't know where we're going. We don't know how long we've got on this rock, and we're all just trying to enjoy our time here. Everything we do amounts to nothing. The way we act makes no difference to anyone but ourselves. So, since we as individuals don't matter one bit in the grand scheme of things, and we will never, ever make a dent in the universe whatsoever, who gives a rat’s ass whether you act the way someone else thinks you should or not? As long as your actions don’t hurt other people, knock yourself out.
History speaks of many who some called godspoken and others called insane, because they rejected what they finally saw as transparent. Instead of either, use this to your advantage. See all others as warm skeletons and you will not be blinded by what they cover themselves with. Never allow yourself to be put down by some temporary voice from a temporary body. And know that your own death is coming, sooner or later, but inevitably, and nothing you do will stop it, or grant you any continuation afterwards. You cannot get credit in Heaven by showing Saint Peter your sex scorecard, or your high school trophy collection, or Key To The City. All you can do is make sure, before you die, that you weren’t the same pointless skeleton as everyone else.
Best get started, because your clock is ticking. That guy or girl you’ve wanted to ask out is waiting, and if he or she isn’t, get over it and move on. That dream job you wish you had, go find. The world is a hard place, and a bolt of lightning or a drunk driver doesn’t care how many sit-ups you did that morning or what that girl at the club thinks of you. Your hopes and dreams are lighter than air unless you get to work making them a reality, and sitting at your computer watching funny videos until four in the morning isn’t going to make it happen.
