So here we are again, it’s the middle of the night and I should be asleep. Instead I sit here waiting for the evening to be over. It’s dark outside but for the street lights. I wonder which of the endless layers of me is writing this, what obscure trophism is pretending to be me right now, creating the narrative force that pretends to be I.

I could be angry or frustrated, or so many things at once. The mind is an endless running brook split by rocks. The streams join together and I emerges out of the wreckage of all of the conflicting pieces, a pretence of a coherent whole. One never sees this sleight of hand except when you do bad things. The doing and the justification rarely hold up when you place them firmly under the microscope. So few people ever do, they just stumble from one moment to the next, thinking they are thinking and deciding things. But it’s all the dance of chemical chimera.

Longer ago than you can count stars exploded and made the matter you are made of. You sit at the bottom of a gravity well, perfectly adapted to what is in front of you, the chain of circumstances, of causes and conditions goes back beyond even those stars.

They died for love, for love could never have existed without them. But they had no mind, no awareness to die for it. Just like sand accumulating on the beach, it is ineluctable and happens without a master plan. So too, this whirling of circumstances that manufactures I will be gone and never seen again. The Buddhist masters say that the lives connected with you are like bricks on top of one another, the wall would not stand without that connection: but I begin to feel that the bricks are just bricks, the connection is the connection behind everything – the fragile I just makes itself and leaves enough traces to allow another one to stand in its place with some of the same attributes.

So let it go, now, and embrace it too.