Monday, Sept. 18, 2006 5:21 p.m.

FOREVER

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I click it. I stare at the white box. I know what I want to say. but I have no clue how it will come out. I push the buttons on the keyboard...and hope.

here goes.

for anyone who's read my diary in the past few months, there is a reoccurring topic, a lot like a plague, that has been haunting my mind. it is a question of meaning, of searching - of longing for death to not be the end. it is a plea for an answer to a perpetual question. it is not my first time to ask, and I highly doubt it will be my last.

do I really want an eternity? an ever-after? a constant constant? a circle that never ends? do I really want to be trapped into some sort of existence for all of infinity?

as kids, we talk about infinity as though it were the largest number. we say things like "infinity times two" when want to top the other person's "infinity". we didn't realize that infinity wasn't finite - we had no concept of anything but.

what is infinity? infinity is...
the song that never ends! yes, it goes on and on my friends! some people started singing it, not knowing what it was - and they'll continue singing it FOREVER just because: this is the song that never ends...

FOREVER.

I thought hard about the concept of eternity, of some sort of existence (perhaps of a spiritual realm, or perhaps not) that continued as though in a circle again and again...if everything went on forever, then would the need or desire for distinction of time and space eventually fade and become obsolete?

it's like saying infinity x infinity = infinity. blah, blah, blah. it's all the same. one day would be part of infinity just as the next day would also. it'd all blur together.

nothing would matter. both 'heaven' and 'hell' would all be hell, for both would an eternal prison sentence.

so maybe it is better that we have one life to live and enjoy - and then we die. and that's all. without an end the journey would never have a purpose, right?

when I was 17, I went on a mission trip to Brazil for the entire summer. we did our laundry in rivers and over the weeks, our clothes slowly took on a particular kind of dinginess. my previously white socks gradually became a faint yellowish off-white.

but I didn't notice as I had nothing of the original white color to compare my socks to. I thought my socks were still as white as the day I bought them.

when I arrived home from the airport, my parents presented me with a gift: a bag of brand new clean white socks.

I remember staring at them, as though they were a foreign color I had never seen. white can get that white? I wondered. white was that brilliant? that amazing? that clean? I felt I had either forgotten or never known what white was.

it may be a strange example, but I think about it often. I had gotten so accustomed to white being a yellowish off white, that I could not have even conceived of a white as bright and brilliant as the white of my gift socks.

I have gotten so accustomed to things like associating boredom with repetition, and eternity to incarceration - that I have failed to realize that things can exist beyond my knowledge or understanding of them.

if a white can exist even brighter than the whitest white I now know, then can't eternity exist in a form that it more pleasing that I can now conceive of?

maybe it can. or maybe it can't. I don't know.

but I like not knowing. because only uncertainty allows for hope.

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