That time of year again.

It is impossible to realize one's own existence, one's identity. I find myself as one of them, not of myself. I simply live an ordinary life, like all others, the to an fro of the everyday. Yet a life less ordinary in that I am myself, separate from all others. My thoughts, while thought by others, are entirely my own. The context necessarily changes, for the circumstances do. How do I reconcile my self with that of my sameness. How do I reconcile my otherness with the fact I am a self? Is there meaning to our experience, other than that which will come after and yet gain it's meaning only in history. Does the present actually present itself as something purely novel, since that is what it truly is. No one has achieved this moment before, and yet billions are realizing the same moment at the same time.

It is not merely a spectacle for we are in it, and we live in it and we leave it in death. But how are we to understand our existence if we are caught up in the ordinary, in the everyday of life. Or is the everyday the only existence we have. There must be a way out. Yet the only way out is death, in which we can realize nothing.

So do we live in the void, the emptiness, the unknown? We look to the past for example and the future as hope. But we rarely live in the present. That is, we rarely TRULY live in the present. For the present is in relation to, and relative because of, its place between the past and the future. The here and now simply is, yet the here and now is an ever-changing, never stable, place in time, that exists only as long as we do. We continually seek further gratifications, seeking out further desires and yet when we achieve them we generally do not realize we have, for we seek to have more. This is an irreconcilable response to living, for the enjoyment we seek, once enjoyed, nevertheless dies in the moment, and hence we seek another. Perhaps this is the beauty of life, but at times, it seems like a curse, of involuntary movement, of the noxious reality of being, and the weight on the ideal of happiness that we continually are driven to realize. Perhaps it is the rationality that it is to be human that inhibits our realization of happiness, for when it does occur, or when we may realize the means for it, we rarely find it in its place, seek it elsewhere, in some new location in time, and the cycle of seeking continues.

I say that I am content with my life, for at the very least, I live. And yet, I cannot bear witness to my happiness, for once it occurs, and once I am conscious of it, it remains only as a memory. It is built upon past experience, which were once a present, however I did not know it then. And I seek my future desires from things to come, and again, when realized, I do not know them.

However, I do feel love, and affection for others. This, is perhaps the only source of happiness that I can feel, for otherwise, it remains simply as memory, yet emotions can be stirred at the sound of a symphony, or a smell.