I am the hamster...

I could just leave it at that, and let the reader decide what it means. But that would be too easy. Think about the life of a hamster. Funny though... never had a hamster as a pet and don't think I ever wanted one. Growing up we always had an indoor/outdoor cat. I never really thought about it before, but anyone of those cats over the years could have just up and left, but they didn't. All except mom's last cat, an orange haired, amber eyed psycho thing that went out one night and never came back... probably eaten by a coyote...  but he was a lean, mean, big cat...  disappeared after mom died..  maybe he went looking. 

Anyways... I got a little sidetracked there. The hamster analogy popped in my head tonight as I was re-reading a piece that I had written a little while ago. It was one that was originally part of something else, but it seemed a little too negative to post at the time. I've edited it down a bit....

This life is transitional.. or is it transitive... or is it both? Regardless, in reasoning, with each transition, whether positive or negative, it leads ultimately only to death. Therefore if my life is nothing and death is nothing, then at this point, why bother with all or any further transitions? If life is about feeding this existence, what is the point? The way I see it, life in general is about perpetual motion. One action resulting in another, leading to another and another, until something ceases to function in the necessary manner causing one action to fail, resulting in the loss of perpetual motion. As a child, one is an integral part of perpetual motion, and then, at some point transitions into a phase of life where they initiate their own forward action. Sometimes something goes wrong and the transition does not occur and you may have an eighteen or twenty year old who feels that they have no future. In this day and age, I don't believe this to be a rare thing anymore. I am one of the lucky ones being of an earlier generation... Even though I had an inkling of that way back then, I was sent into perpetual motion for the next twenty years until it stopped and I had to step up and get the wheel back in motion on my own. It worked initially. Only thing is... something gave in... There was a lurch in the spin and I was forced to stop again. And now once more I am faced with the realization that life has no meaning and that there is nothing to look forward to. It is not even a matter of the future being bleak anymore... it is a matter of there no longer being a future. This is what most people with their own lives being in constant perpetual motion cannot come to understand. Most people... heck... all the people in my life have impetus in their own lives... a child, a spouse, a job, a bottle of booze, a significant other, a pill, a desire of some sort, a want, a need. Me? What do I have? My existence here, as it stands, in this place... it is all I have...  it is everything... but ultimately nothing in and of itself. In reconsidering my thoughts on life being about perpetual motion, I have to ask why it is that I cannot instigate the requisite forward action? I could before, having an outside motivation, even if it was only the motivation to keep the proverbial hamster wheel in motion. Why is it that I do not want to move forward anymore? Why is it that now, at this late stage of the game... I seem to have lost that fundamental part of me called independence? As odd as it may sound, I have lost the forward momentum that allowed me to remain in one place. Why is it that after spending forty some odd years on this planet, I have come back to "I don’t know who I am” and “I don’t know what I want”....  I have travelled forward only to find myself back at square one. So... knowing that life is for living, maybe someone made a mistake along the way.

I was going to delete that last sentence, but then... that is where I ended up after all that. Granted I have visited almost the exact same thoughts a few times on the blog... but.. then... after all.. I am the hamster.