Every mistake mints us into the people we are. We feel fire, fire that rushes up, all-consuming, from the jowls to the forehead; we hear thunder, unexpectedly and frighteningly self-manufactured; we experience the painful catharsis of realizing the thing that’s happened and what we had done to cause it. And in that moment of truth we flinch with shivering determination to preserve the immaculate conception of ourselves, and try to find solace in hiding, pushing the broken wheel of fortune as far down the road as the incline facilitates, hauling it to a different address. Or, sometimes, on the days when the rainbow hangs bright and low, we open our doors to the load that is now our burden. It is admittedly a complex game of chance.
The reason why we keep certain breeds of cats and dogs as pets and count them as among our closest friends is because their actions, once properly noticed, do not look like deliberate mechanisms of nature – their choices and mistakes do not translate to purposeful moves in this Darwinian game of chess. They act independently of a transcendent organic force. This observation may seem inaccurate from a macro perspective of a crowded park with its dog owners and their requisite golden retrievers – yet it is within our individual human perception to recognize that there is humanity in the eyes and gait of a loyal canine. We have found ourselves in these animals precisely because we care for them too much to think of them as cogs in the eternal wheel. Sometimes we ought to do more of the same for ourselves.
And if we think the person – one out of billions – whom we label ‘I’ can be refined incessantly through experience (weather a noble process of distillation, and hopefully turn out for the better) – then why not the next?
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