The path gradually enters into dense vegetation. I am worn out and need rest. Will I not find the place till I am almost dead?


I am at times frustrated by the need to live/At times I become frustrated by the /with the need to live/There are times I get fed up with the business of living. Would it not be less stressful to just end it all? The temptation that emerged when I found myself almost wandering onto rail tracks one agonised night. Or at the London Underground, the subtle call of the tracks to throw myself onto them, inviting them to snap the agony of life. Then all the agonies of decision/making/ of matching/of arbitrating between competing demands will be put to rest. Within the limbo/the in-between space of the beyond, whatever its content, I/one would not need to contend with the struggles of conscience, with the tearing at my/one’s mind of the tension between my/one’s ideals and the sorry state of the eventually revealed reality. I/One/the representative of homo sapiens, whose intelligence, whose capacity for self reflexive thought/thinking and being able to look back upon ones thoughts/so that he is hardly completely satisfied with any options he is able to conceive, which is/a power/capacity/ability/ his strength as well as his burden/curse, would be at rest.
But I flinch from the precipice of inflicting the anonymity of unconsciousness on the piercingly sweet agony of being. Odysseus hails the greatest of Homer’s Greek warriors Achilles, on meeting him in the world of the dead, as one who must surely be lauded as great among the shades, but Achilles replies “I would rather be the lowliest servant of a masterless man, living on iron rations, than be king among the dead”. Steiner writes that if that sentiment had prevailed before the ten year Trojan war of Homers Iliad, /which /Homer wrote about in and which Schliemann, in /discovered archaeological evidence for evidence for in ,then writes/comments Steiner, there would have been peace before Troy.
The notion of the superiority of the bittersweet power of life over the dubious/unknown /attractions/lure of the otherworldliness or oblivion of death is summed up by Azaro’s father in Okri’s Famished Road whose child, having resolved to will himself to death, nears death, struggles to lure him back to the world by describing the glory of this painful life: “We are the miracles that God made to taste the bitter fruits of time” “We did not make this strange bed that we have to sleep on. But this world is real” “We have sorrow, but it is the sister of love, and the mother of music”.
We move on then, inspired by oases of hope, and perhaps one day, we shall experience with the Akan poet, the convergence of the path embodied by the struggle of our lives with a source of meaning:

The river crosses the path,
The path crosses the river.
Which is the elder?
We made the path and found the river.
The river is from long ago,
The river is from the creator of the universe.