Hairless Monkeys Grasping at the Air

Those crazy monkeys keep trying to grab the moon, never realizing that all they're seeing is a reflection of it in the water.

A couple hundreds of thousands of years have left us far less hairy than them, but it hasn't made us any less confused about what is around us.



We reach far more deeply than they do, and many times we get our hands on something, but that thing is almost never really the thing that we were reaching for.

It's hard to express this kind of truth without other people thinking that it's sad.  It's not sad, though; it's just the way that things are.

We reach for reflections of moons.
We fall in love with the ideas that we have about someone.
We call a chair a chair until it is broken in pieces, when we no longer view it as the same object.

And yet we want that moon, and we want that love, and we want to be able to name and categorize the world.

We spend all Sunday morning thinking of blueberry pancakes smothered in maple syrup.  After four bites of them we tire of it and move on to the rest of our breakfast.  Our senses constantly crave, and we believe that partaking of those cravings will make us happy.

We connect ourselves to ideologies, taking in information that we like and ignoring information that we don't.  Our minds constantly crave reinforcement, and we believe that when we are proven right about a random fact that we're happy.

We imagine that our life has a narrative, that we are one being moving steadily forward in time, secure in its past, when all we really have is a never ending series of presents.  We crave continuity and permanency, and we take supplements and pills and resort to idiotic exercises all in the belief that a longer life will make us happy.

We want to not feel pain when we lose a loved one, or to simply not be at all.  We crave distance from the world just as much as we crave involvement, and some of us, sometimes, sadly, think that ending it all will make us happy.

Our cravings are those of a hominid let loose on the savannah, hungry and insecure and determined to survive and pass on our genes at all cost.  They are infinite and therefore unable to be fulfilled.  We can never hope to come to peace with ourselves or the world around us merely by looking to fulfill them.  We can only try to overcome a small amount of our ignorance of them.

Living in ignorance is our essential lot in life, but that does not mean that we have to live ignorantly.