What’s the point?

 

 

Reading quietly in my kitchen I am suddenly assaulted with:

 

WHAT’S THE POINT?

 

I don’t know where this came from and now it’s in my head.

 

Disarming and unexpected, I don’t know that I’ve ever had an answer to this.

 

I close the book and think.

 

I stand up and look out the window at the frozen, stupid, grey street and feel completely

 

isolated.

 

I’ve spoken to people recently and even laughed and hung out but

 

right now

 

it feels like that has never happened.

 

Or like most moments with others are guarded or short and shallow but because I’m so grateful to get any interaction at all I’ll take anything I can get and don’t realize what it was like until much later.

 

And I feel so loudly

 

irrelevant

 

and in the way and taking up space.

 

And it’s obvious that me not being at all has got to be better for the world than me being here like this.

 

I walk around the house.

 

I lay down on the floor and look around.

 

Is everything around me what “makes” the point?

 

If that was true then it would be me who ultimately makes it.

 

I look at the spines of my books. Some are who I’ve been, others who I’ve been encouraged to be, and the rest show who I am or look forward to being.  They connect me to stories and interests and those in turn connect me, I suppose, 

 

to others.

 

To other people. 

 

And I look at my plants- all green, some blooming.

 

It was me who put them there. And they grow.

 

They don’t expect anything from me, they’ll just thrive if I tend to them and die if I don’t.

 

Maybe somewhere within that is the point: pursuing my interests and creating dependencies around me I give myself a role.

 

I have to construct an environment around me so I have something to tend to and care about.

 

So I have reason to be.

 

And there can be a point.

 

But I’ve done that. For years. The job I love, my home, all the places I go, the people I know, it’s all a proof of that.

 

Yet the question still comes up.

 

I turn on the radio and the world fills the room. A hopeful music teacher talking about the importance of teaching music to children. Something about them learning so much more than just that, which is pretty big in itself. And I wonder if that’s her making “a point”

 

for them

 

as well as for herself (they’ll need her to make this happen and both a job and a need is created for her, making a point for her too).

 

There is no end to this.

 

And I can faintly sense a more chipper self in the distance saying,

 

“Sweetheart, that’s just the wrong question”.

 

Explaining that questions like this are lose/lose questions for people without a god because the fact is that you are simply here and what you can do, your point, is to use every resource possible to make the best of the time that you are here so that you can leave everything better than you found it. Right?

 

Hhrrmmph….

 

I think I’m ready for my Huxley Soma now…Hmmm… maybe in the form of a show… maybe a Northern Exposure episode is in order…