The Parade

Do we really have a plan for life?  Can we?

Objectives, aims, goals, certainly. There are plenty of us who have those, and you only need glance at social media to be bombarded with people who are telling you that they are in control of life! They know what they are doing, they have a plan and by gosh they make it happen!

Fine in theory, but all it takes is for life to have other ideas of its own and then our 'plan' isn't worth anything.

When life strikes in that unexpected and often cruel way, it is then that our participation in the tawdry parade of irrelevance to which we're all slave is interrupted. We fall off the float onto the roadside and for a second we're outside of that parade and we can see it for what it is. Watching it sap the energies of those trapped within it greedily, as they dance happily by.

We get the joke, and it's a black, sick, shambolic one and our lives are the punchline.

But you have to participate, because to stay on that roadside, to just watch and not dance along, well that's to deny being.

You have to be a human being, otherwise you're just a human existing. Decaying. We have to be, even if the mechanics of being itself seem absurd or arbitrary. That's the joke we talked about. We know it's pointless, we know it's stupid. We know that it is without reason or purpose but we still do 'it.'

This truth while somber needn't be a bitter one. It's just a fact like oxygen.

The parade, while in of itself quite pointless, has experiences within it that are not.

The parade we elude to is not life itself you understand, but the practices we deem necessary to attain 'success' within it.

Those who refuse to play their designated part in these proceedings are case aside by society.

The homeless, the dispossessed, the mentally ill in some cases.  They see the joke for what it is and would rather lie in the roadside than spend a moment longer participating in the habitual lunacy.

In a way it is much to their credit, but being 'off grid' as they are, it's clear to see that the modern world spits them out.

Denying them its spoils, its riches, they are the modern equivalent of lepers. Regarded contemptuously by the majority of the parade dancing past them, sneering through their smiles, in a sense; they almost cease to exist.

The parade of life... Money, work, business, striving to tomorrow, striving to reach... what?

Means, the means to 'make good.' To arrive at a point where we are 'comfortable,' to be 'happy.'

If we amass enough riches in our short stint, we pass them on to our offspring, and thus the parade goes on as they dance on by, while we litter the roadside...

Author's Note

Thanks a lot for reading, any thoughts or reviews are always most welcome :)