As my body approaches its end point I have realized that I need to focus upon how I want to proceed during my final span of days. When I take a summary view of things I come up with the following -
I have lived my life with death mostly present in the side mirror of consciousness, and because I have been moving along the path for more than 50 years I have to remind myself that although I have stayed ahead of death for a long while, one day it is going to get into my blind spot and overtake me. Sensing that my body is in decline with its energy and mass and with death sensing my slowness it is going to speed up so I believe I don't have much time left in the race.
The way I have lived in relation to survival is to work whatever random job I could get and this aspect of my life has relied heavily on chance, luck, and fortune or lack of it. As each year passes I sense that my store of good luck is running out and will soon be gone, which means that the ability to exchange my time for money is going to be heavily diminished, thus leaving me without a way to continue living with secure shelter and food.
Instead of being inspired to look for a wage job I have instead been considering the choices which are available to my consciousness. Working a wage job for so many years has dulled my perception to the reality that at any moment I have an infinite amount of choices available, and yet because of the nature of working in the same space and at the same time, the choices I choose to be aware of are so narrow that I end up choosing similar things day after day. If my life's days were a continuum of chess games, instead of playing a variety of openings I have chosen to play the same opening thousands of times. And now with death stepping closer and currently not being constrained to a single point in space and time due to not working a wage job, I have recently become aware again that I can play something other than 1e4. The reason most people choose 1e4, instead of say, 1 b4, is that 1 e4 is known to lead to a safe and predictable game with good chances of success. If one were close to death, however, success no longer means extending one's days but rather making the most of the small amount of days remaining. If I wanted to go out in a flare of crazy light I could play 1a3 and be guaranteed an unusual outcome, akin to jumping off a bridge, not much chance for survival and cause of death could be considered suicide. So putting 1a3 aside, there are safer alternatives which can still lead to curious and new ways to perceive the unfolding of a series of days.
And so I am thinking about changing my life's opening, but at the moment I have no concrete ideas about what I should do. Having just completed an unusual opening by traveling to SE Asia for 4 months, I am wondering what else could be done. If I wanted to I could wake up tomorrow and start walking in a random direction and not return home for a week, seeing where my feet take me. Having just written that I now feel a flow of chilled energy surge through me, that choice of opening seems quite interesting and possible, it is just one of many things I could do tomorrow, yet I will most likely play 1 e4 and walk the lakeshore path for 2 hours, return home for lunch, nap, read, and make an entry here.
Time is short, I should not fear doing something out of the ordinary.
Artifact, 1991
Artifact, 2004