Phoenix
by Dale J. Sprague
Reveries
12.1998 I lived in one of those housekeeping room houses, but I occupied the main floor, which served as an apartment. I waged a relentless war on the cockroaches. I had no idea where they were breeding. One day, frustrated, I saw one crawling across the table in the middle of the kitchen. I went after it. I had a spatula in my hand and was whacking the table after it. The critter knew those were deadly blows aimed at it, and it was scrambling for its life. It was moving fast in a frenzy as I attacked. It bolted fast in a desperate attempt to escape and was running so fast that it went straight off the table and was airborne. It bulleted straight off the table, out into the thin air ahead of it and nose dived two or three feet to the floor. This is a little critter about three quarters of an inch long, and perhaps a quarter of an inch high on its legs at a dead run off a serious high mesa plateau. Relevant to me, this computes to a bluff approximately sixty to seventy feet high, though no doubt the critter didn't have any sense of how far it was down. Under its deadly circumstances, irrelevant. No time to sense. It didn't stop to bother with any sensible reading of the empty space ahead. It had more important things to do...surviving me. It took an urgent path right off the top of that high mesa bluff, landed, tumbled a few times, and kept right on running. When I saw that, its desperation, a wave of admiration for it passed through me. Life was precious to that little critter, and I didn't have the heart to go any further.
The meaning of life?
If we pose the question and rationalize an answer, does it end up focusing on only a small portion of the reasons, weakening the rest.
And obviously, us humans are not the only ones possessed deeply with the answer to this question, though we are probably the only ones on Earth possessed more by the question than the answer. Is this one of the hazards of being self aware to the extent that we are?