He is good at impressions, he loves finding pieces of himself through the acting of someone other than himself. His real character, he does not take the idea of wanting to be anyone other than himself enjoyable. He is me. That is me, the one writing now. I’ve played many characters in my time. Even a character who believed that he was no longer a character at all. I had ascended beyond my ego, found nirvana, but that one soon understood that no matter what I did I had to play a character. It all became a game to him at that point.
From then he told himself that he had no physical limitations. That since he was a game, if he acted it so could he become. If anyone could do it, there was no reason he couldn’t do it as well. That didn’t take long to wear off before he had desired to change to his next role.
It went on for months, then years. He continued to play a side role every day that would push his own limitations. At the same time he seeked daily for a new role. Through these different roles he played he began to notice a contradiction in the characters he played. Conflict rose in his mind and there was no desire for discourse, it became a warzone. Attacking and defending all the different roles he thought of himself to be. It was black and white. He got lost, forgot which one was which. Amidst his confusion he found courage through the one thing that remained unchanged, his training. The one that started this venture into different roles, the one that removed the boundaries to begin with which allowed the possibility of different roles to be played. Truth is hard to come by. Yet the realization sparked a renaissance of sorts within his mind, word got out to all the different characters he now played, the truth was near.
The truth came, and it did not leave a sense of applause within his mind, but a sense of silence. Truth is that it does not matter who he is or what he does, he will cease to exist when he dies and so will each sense of self he attaches onto. Even so, that never stopped the training. He continued to train religiously. Even while all the voices of the different hims gathered around watching him, mocking him about his feeble pursuit.
He did not stop. He instead answered back to all the mocking and laughter. He said something to them that stopped all the mocking in its tracks. He said he knew it was all pointless. He knew he would cease to be. Still, he wanted to see what he would become if he just did not stop going. He needed no other reason than the curiosity that sparked in him about what he could become.
While he played many roles, he could still only play the ones that he could do. That he could understand and reason with. This one had no reasoning. There was nothing you could tell it to get it to stop, nothing you could do to it. Nothing that happened to it, it always pushed forward. You could sabotage relationships, ruin his life, leave him with less than nothing and he still wouldn’t waiver.
There it was, the truth was unveiled.
You could matter in a world where nothing matters. You could become something that otherwise wouldn’t have existed if not for having played your role to its fullest extent. All the way.
By accepting the harshness of the world and the way it is. By accepting the meaninglessness of your own existence and still living to create your own meaning.
If I continued and got to where I wanted to get to, then that new character I’d be would be able to make changes for the better in my own life. I could help someone to change their own life. I want to be able to guide others to what I’ve seen. Maybe by doing so I could help push forth a change in the whole world itself. I could help us create a meaning out of nothing, by first finding meaning for myself.
I know I can’t change the world, but I can change myself.
Through this changing of self I will inevitably leave a trickle of cause and effects along the way. Ones that might just lead to something beautiful forming. Something I’d be proud to say I did.
That is the way to exceed being nothing. By becoming everything you could have been and more.
