On Life

Dreary, cold, grey days

Snowcapped mountains

Reading Leavitt’s Indian Clerk

Listening to Mahler’s Fifth

Peter my constant invisible companion

In thought, in word, in dreams

Piecing together a life recorded and unrecorded

What was important

What is important

Asking questions no one asked then

Questions asked today by me, by others

 

What is life?

A sum of achievements

A sum of days lived

A sum of lives influenced

A sum of lessons learned

A sum

 

God has watched countless lives

Come and go

Go and come

Lives can draw us closer

Lives can repulse

Hitler who murdered millions

Was ardently opposed to animal cruelty

An enigma

At once gentle and demonic

Questions better left unanswered

 

Twenty-four hours

A day

What was accomplished?

What did we learn?

Did we grow or atrophy?

Are we better or are we worse?

Or indifferent?

Does it matter?

Does it make a difference to anyone?

Do questions justify breathing

 

A mathematical genius

From poverty-stricken background

Stricken down in the prime of life

By something avoidable

A wasted life - 

Better left undiscovered.

What was the point

Equations and proofs

So many hours spent

While the sun rises and sets regardless

 

Do answers provide meaning?

Do answers validate a life?

 

An explosion in Beirut

Lives lost in an instant

Lives lost in spite of medical intervention

An accident? 

Negligence?

Apathy?

Welding in a warehouse filled with explosive material

In comparison

How is that different from life

Lived in a hostile world

 

Must questions always be answered?

Or can we live with the tension?

 

Thoughts

Random thoughts

Structured thoughts

On life

 

Within the greater scheme of things

The little lives plod on

On

To where?

Mahler’s melody rises in random noise

Notes on a music sheet

Originally moving between synapses

Created in contemplation

Of life

Life

 

Is God watching?

Are we wasting what he generously gives?

But what is really important in the life he watches?

What makes him smile?

What makes him weep?

Is God directing?

Do we walk as he walked?

Thirty years undocumented

Were those too unimportant to instruct

Nothing from which to learn.

 

Every hair on a head is counted

Every swallow accounted for

Nothing is unnoticed

He sees all

Knows all

Pities all

Cares

Builds castles out of messes

But does not answer questions

Answers do not lead us closer

 

Every moment

Every moment spent with him

He cherishes

More than everything we deem precious

A weaver at the loom

Weaving threads of lives

Into tapestries

Some threads fall to the ground

Others are woven in gold

Life refined

 

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2020