“Life on the edge;” “the cutting edge;” we’ve all heard of the “edge,” and it seems like an attractive place, but the change that this edge-ness represents isn’t just the novelty our bored heads crave. There is a lot at stake when you travel to the edge and back, or work on the bleeding edge. Get too close, and we cut our selves, or … fly off the cliff.
As individuals we seem to seek barriers to break, and triumphs to win. We want to struggle with the unknown, or the seemingly unknown, to conquer some primordial fear. Somehow our quests prove to ourselves that we are more than our impulses and instincts, but alas that drive to face down fear is just that, isn’t it? An impulse.
I’ve always found it odd that the things people fear are the simply overcome things in life; spiders, snakes, heights, enclosures, to name a few. With even a somewhat evolved mind, none of those things pose any threat to our individual safety or or collective well being, yet the phobias mingle on in generation after generation of people.
Our instincts control us in so many ways, and we are always in a battle with our own minds to feel evolved and carry on reasoned thinking. At any moment we can fall victim to ourselves and become someone else, and maybe someone less, for a moment or for a hundred moments. When it happens, its hard to know what we’ll do next. That scares us. Maybe we race through a changing street light, or yell at a waitress, or often much worse. We all have that in us, and those moments pepper our lives from the moment we enter the world to the moment we leave it.
We are a hoard of individuals with multiple personalities, and we are all on the edge. No one knows when one of us will be cut or will fall off the other side, so it keeps us on that edge. There’s excitement in it, like a game of Russian roulette, but our collective minds grow weary of the stress. Life on the edge robs us of any sense of solid ground.
The games we play mascaraed as an evolved existence when we live out there… on the edge.
Where do we go when we’ve only learned to walk in a straight line, often pushed to do so by the mob around us, and in our path lies a mortal challenge?
Leave a Reply