oasis(?)

18 Jun, 2026

Recently, I’ve come to realize I’m not sure what I want. If you’re reading this and you know me personally, this may come as a shock. Nevertheless, I believe it to be true.

I’ve spent much of my life desiring after certain goods. Taste, a respected job, knowledge, reputation, character, worthwhile relationships. Out of all these and more, I’ve attempted to pursue the select few I considered virtuous.

But now, as I look back to the choices made and values inculcated, I can’t suppress the feeling that I’ve spent my life sprinting towards an illusory oasis, desperately holding onto the conviction that a sip from its phantom spring will finally bring me satisfaction.

I’m left with the question: For what purpose do I trek onward? For the faintest beat that one day, the skies will open—azure blue—and I may then fall to my knees and possibly know? Is that a life worth living? To march forward blindly, cursed by the choices made by your ever ignorant younger self, bound by the weakness of fleshly human chains?

Though my mind laments, my heart cuts through the melodrama, and cries that life—even in squalor or confined to a remote narrow ledge or in everlasting darkness and solitude or in the midst of endless tempest—is inarticulably more than the goods pursued.

How can it not be? Only a fool sits on his deathbed counting threads, blind to the tapestry of his life. Live, live, live. For without it, how will you appreciate the little sticky leaves, and the precious tombs, and the blue sky, and the woman you love?¹ Onward! Onward towards the phantom spring and let us pray its ephemeral liquor be sweet.

. . .