Alive

As a physiological battle rages inside me, I bear witness to how my thoughts and feelings differ and how much less energy I have for others currently. As I walk along the packed St. Kilda promenade where people are playing, lazing about and enjoying the energy from the sun, a single thought haunts me like a shadow dancing in my peripheral vision, 'What is living?'.

My first reaction is to be an engineer and break down the question. Three words present themselves: 'What', 'is' and 'living'. Immediately the aggregate of 'What is?' gets replaced with 'What IS' and the application of a Zen like methodology of investigation via direct untainted experience… it recurses back in upon itself… 'IS, IS, IS, is'ing spilling forth'… thought then stops temporarily and the leaves in the tree rustle of their own accord, smells pass through me and sounds dance together in rings of folk celebration.

Then the 'LIVING' word hits home hard. The mind spiders backwards in time searching and indexing so many collected experiences, patterns played out both voluntarily and involuntarily. Patterns and models, nay... modalities of living swim in my oceanmind… individualism, collectivism, survival, procreation, shared experiences, ontologies… my heart both rises and falls simultaneously at the few times in this entity's existence that a very deep 'true love' shone through. Without grasping, seeking or searching, one wonders about the conditions and states that allowed such purity to blossom.

Meanwhile another process running in parallel is both comparing and scaling in and out of the planet, then universe, and back down to my neighbourhood where it focuses finally, fractal like, inside my body where cells fight for dominance. I acknowledge the ecosystem whereby there is no border between my mind, my bodily vehicle and its environment. At the quantum scale and beyond one vibrates while moving through the foam. This observer constantly affects and reinforces the reality it perceives. It touches us.

There is no want, need or desire. Neutral. Are only those privileged enough to have discretionary time the ones wasting it on such a question? The question repeats itself.

What is living?