Does life even have a purpose
Or has society given it meaning
I don't remember being born with a checklist
But society saw my gift and wrote my destiny

I try to elude it, but it always finds me
Is free-will a myth and is success the only deity
Don’t get me wrong I’m not complaining
I’m not the recalcitrant teen who rebels to revel
I’m the one who’s lost at the intersection of fate and destiny

God decides your fate they told me
They told me there’s a god inside me
And the fate I’ve chosen is poles apart my destiny
I am coerced into craving this utopic life idealised by society
Who should I pick, who knows better?
Society that evolved over eternity or a teen just past puberty

In these moments I turn to love to help me
I think of my parents and do as they tell me
Love demands selflessness and that will drive me
My purpose on this earth is to help everyone besides me

"Death gives meaning to life."
It makes me so angry, because,
How ridiculous is it not?
That we accept an end?

Death does not give meaning to life.
- We do.
And meaning is not something to be given
It is something to be taken.
With every breath -
With every step -
And every leap you take
You create your purpose.

"Death gives meaning to life."
No.
Living does.

You do not read a book for the end
-you read it for the journey.
You should not wake up just to go to bed
-you wake up to enjoy the day.

You do not live to die.
You live to live.

I go through the motions.
Each step I realize a bit of what everyone has already figured out billions of times over.
Each big interval in life, each trudge up the steps.
One after the other.
Connecting, dot to dot to dot to dot.
And for what?
To finish a painting with no end.
Maybe it completes itself at the very precipice of death.
But by then what is the point of its existence.
The fleeting beauty of a singular moment at the very end when it all clicks into place.
I've seen a thousand sun sets each a different form and hue.
I'm familiar with fleeting beauty and it doesn't serve a thing.
With all life has to offer why am I left hollow and wanting.
Will this biological nightmare ever end.
The sentience of swirling sticky chemicals is trick played on us all.

Finishings can be
The hardest part
In these final steps
All the craftsmanship
Has already occured
The finishings are
Mere inevitabilities

You must
Come to terms
With the idea that  
Perfection is a
Necessary goal
Precisely because
It is unattainable

You must reconcile
Yourself to failure

It's not perfect
You have to make
Your peace with that

How?
Well..
You lay out
Your tools
And you
start again

At the end of Nimmo's Pier
on a mid-week evening in July,
I gaze across the bay
with the city to my back.

To my left a heron potters about
in orange lamplight, from my right
two lads' conversation drifts
across the harbor docks,

Behind me the city thrums
with its mid-summer's nightlife.
My over-stimulation from three days
of intense work fades, my solemn thoughts