Life, as it occurs to you, doesn’t altogether lead to a crescendo. Life seems to mosey along. The top layer of life you mostly ride on seems to do many about-faces. Instead of a clear point, life appears roundabout, spinning around, and you tend to conclude that often, too often, life is simply a joke on you, and it’s not funny.

The punch line that seems to repeat itself is that you take the top layer of life very seriously. Sure, as everyone seems to do, you do too. Life, as you see it, often has not struck you as light-hearted. It may have struck you that your life has been more about untying yourself from a fence that you can’t quite jump over.

When you see yourself as a victim, at some point in it all, it dawns on you that you are your own perpetrator of a joke you play on yourself. This is not to dwell on, of course. You are both the writer and the reader of the book you hold in your hands. Life, even when you are opposed to it, is dear to you. Life is really only a hop, skip and a jump away from you. From your personal point of view, what can you do but take all the ponderings seriously?

Even when it is only a shadow chasing you, you are, nevertheless, the one who is being chased. It is your very life We are speaking of. Your life may be nothing but flim-flam, yet it is your flim-flam. You only know how to hold life tight as if your appointed life actually is a matter of life or death, birth or demise. Understandably, you hang onto all this apparent fiddling around with all your might. What else can you do with this fiction in time? You are reading a romance novel or a spy thriller which you take to be an autobiography you stumble on, and you are smack in the middle of it. What a page-turner you fell into with such precision and division.

How can you possibly wake up from this story when it is so bent on following you up and down the mountain trails? How can you possibly outrun life and get ahead of it? The story you follow runs far faster than you. You are like a racehorse who tries to outrace his own record. You are caught in a spell. You see no exit, yet you go as fast as you can. Try as you may, you are not great at outdistancing yourself.

There are others who accompany you in life who seem to go faster than you. You find them in front of you holding out nuggets of life to lead you on. There are also sometimes mysteries such as: Who is really a friend and who masquerades as one? And try as you may, you may not quite catch up to the kernels of truth of your life on Earth.

You would really like to become wise. You may keep falling for the same old tricks. There seems to be no way out for you. You trip over the same pot hole again and again. You wonder if there can possibly be others who repeat themselves as you do. Diligently, you repeat yourself again and again, if not to your defeat, at least to your chagrin.

You’ve been in this same spot before. You bounce awake, temporarily clamping your left hand to your dazed forehead and your right hand to your aching heart. You’ve repeated yourself for the nth time with no end in sight. We can say that life is an unending phase you go through, even as you have no real clue as to how it all began. Perhaps it’s a mysterious kind of waterwheel you ride on. Oh, My!