Great Expectations

It is frail. It falters and stumbles and we still spend our lives chasing it and feeling the compulsive need to acquire it. To have it in our lives. To want it, to live it. Many crimes are committed in its name, many lives lost, many sacrifices made, many sorrows lived.

And yet, when we have it, it isn't what we envisioned. It isn't always the joy-imparting goodness that we thought it would be. It fails us and we fail it. We look for new-ness in our lives so we do not have the time to look at the cracks that have appeared in it while the sands of time slipped between our fingers.

We travel, we have hobbies, we invest, we save, we spend, we have children, we work long hours, we write, we read, we socialise, we eat more than we should, we drink, we make love, we talk more than we need to, just so we can avoid looking at what we have in our hands, just so time passes quickly and we can say, in one great rush, that life was beautiful.

But time and again, it surfaces and resurfaces, and we realise in our hearts that the perfection we seek eludes us, the imperfect ones, in our need to understand the unknown, in our need to acquire that which cannot be possessed. Time and again, in our heart of hearts, we know we will never have it for it will not come from the sources we are looking at. Like expecting nectar from the serpent't mouth that can only spew venom, like expecting honey from the ocean, like expecting immortality from the human body.

The illusion shatters, every instance, for neither can we live up to it, nor can it live up to us. And so we go on, century after century, looking for unconditional love from humans. For we know this chase will never cease, the end will never come.

In that unceasing search, we find our immortality. In that immortality, we find the un-end we are looking for, every minute of the day. For unconditional love is an ideal. Not the reality we truly desire.