The Chair

It's no big secret of mankind that a certain few people are somehow destined for greatness, scaling the highest heights, effortlessly finding their way into the zeitgeist of the age; while others just sort of sit around passively, submissive to whatever chaotic demands chance imposes, resigned to endeavor nothing more than what subsistence will require. If you don't have a list of fairly impressive accomplishments to stand behind, odds are, you fall into the latter category. Make no mistake: This is a world for go-getters, early risers, and people's people. If you're not one, tough luck.

Sitting somewhere in the middle of the living room of an almost entirely nondescript apartment, located in the center of a city somewhere just like everywhere else, Oswald sat in his old raggedy green recliner, the same as ever, staring out at the wall, contemplating the meaning of life. Little did he know that for a brief moment, he came closer to figuring it out than anyone else had before. Unfortunately, he wasn't paying much attention to the thoughts running through his head at the time, as they floated by. In fact, he wasn't really paying attention to much of anything at all. He just stared out and let the movements of his mind's thinking go where they may.

Who knows how many strokes of genius passed by unnoticed, how many “eureka!” moments slipped by the wayside and drifted back into the void of nothingness from whence they came, as he stared out vacantly. The thing is, Oswald was in the wrong place. He was perpetually in the wrong place. He could have been out conquering the summit of Everest, or circumnavigating a sloop to the ends of the seas, or building a vast empire to shape the course of human history, if only he wasn't sat in his chair staring at the wall. It was the limitations of his circumstances that held him so rigidly in place, aloof from himself as much as anything else.

Now, anybody who knows anything about the meaning of life knows that the best place to discover it is sitting in a chair, staring blankly at a wall, letting your thoughts drift by on their own. As it so happens, it is seldom arrived at in any other manner. If you haven't discovered the meaning of life, I can't tell you about it. You must discover it on your own. You must go sit in a chair and stare at a wall until it comes to you.

Oswald sat and stared, and imagined what it would be like to be sitting in another chair, staring at another wall somewhere in another living room of another apartment in some other city that's just like everywhere else. Would he be able to tell the difference? Would there be any real difference? Or was the chair replaceable? Was the wall replaceable? Was he himself replaceable? The thought startled him for a second.

He began to ponder about a universe that was inconsistent, where one day one wall was there, and the next another, only the version of him there lacked the ability to discern any difference. He often imagined these types of things. He liked to try to work out what laws might govern such a seemingly unpredictable alternate reality, a place so contrary to the world as it actually is. Does material existence give our universe a significant difference from those that are merely imagined? Or is this only a trivial detail about the way they are?

If you sit staring out, doing not much of anything in particular, the moment you will find yourself in is incomprehensibly endless. It may present itself to you as a constant becoming, a continually renewed present that arises out of a former present fading away into memory...afterthought...then nothing at all. This is something that happens with every moment, but those in particular where you're sitting in a chair, staring at a wall are a magnitude more ephemeral. Does one even truly exist in such a state? It's hard to say.

As he sat there, Oswald would often think about all the things he might someday do. He would think about the things he had already done. Every passing thought reaffirmed his existence. Sometimes he needed that. For the most part, whenever he found himself in the midst of an occasion attributed some importance, he could only manage to think about the very moment itself, as though it were a scene on a stage, as if he were an outsider peering back at it from afar, witnessing some oddity. Yet, to be genuinely in the moment—fully present, neither reflecting nor analyzing, but simply enduring in it manifestly, attending to its immediacy and tangible essence—is such a profound thing to experience, albeit as difficult to attain as it is rare. Oswald held a paralyzing fear deep down that if he never existed in the moment, he would eventually disappear altogether.

He thought about the moments that had passed. What had happened to them? Where did they go? They certainly aren't here now. Yet he was still there. The chair was still there. The wall was still there. All three were ever as he remembered, yet those moments he remembered seemed to him to have ceased to exist any longer. How could such things remain as they pass through time, and yet at the same time, the time had passed, and those instances of them, as they were at that time, passed along with the time itself? It seemed to Oswald that he, the chair, and the wall couldn't exist simultaneously in the past and the present in two different states: one which is complete and unchanging, the other the very embodiment of change itself, or changing as it were. How could the present both pass into the future, and pass by into the past, both moving into that which has yet to exist and that which exists no longer at the same time? But it occurred to him that it must.

At that very moment, Oswald became truly alive for the first time in his life, for at that very moment, he understood that his life was inextricably entwined with the chair, and the wall, and the apartment, and the city somewhere just like everywhere else. He understood that he was in the wrong place. And more importantly, he understood just what it would be like to be in another apartment, sitting in another chair, staring at another wall, in another place.

This brought on an intense feeling of unease. The thought of it rattled his bones, in fact. And yet, there was something strangely tantalizing about the idea. Maybe there's something to it?

No sooner did he think this than was the very moment itself gone. It had slipped away into the past like all the others before it. And so, Oswald went back to doing what he had been doing before: sitting in his chair, staring at the wall, vapidly contemplating the meaning of life.

This is a world for go-getters, and some people are destined for greatness, while others sit around passively doing only what absolutely must be done for subsistence. It should, however, be acknowledged that this endless moment in which we always find ourselves, pressing forward eternally into the future, drifting away in equal measure into the past, chimera that it be, is all that ever is. Though, as it is, it already is all that ever was, and all the while, becomes all that ever will be. The only way to truly embrace it, to become truly alive, is to be in it, and not in that which exists no longer nor in that which has yet to.