In Its Shadow

A Prose Piece

More and more. Faster and faster. Those are the feelings that swirl and swirl as society careens towards some inevitable unknown fate.

It is as if some forgotten someone chopped down an ancient, enormous, impossibly tall tree. A tree that towered over the cosmos. With a final blow the cutter cried “Timber!” A sound that sent us all running scared.

The tree was so massive, so monolithic, it has taken millennia to fall. And after all this time we have forgotten the warning, we have forgotten the crashing tree, all we remember is the frantic fleeing feeling. All we remember is the desperate need to get out of the way, and get out from the falling shadow.

That shadow hangs over us. It is reflected in every frantic action, every stress, and every anxiety. That impending doom, the idea that we will all be crushed. It’s in your blood and bone and every other little piece of you.

There is so much to do. To get ahead of. To get away from. We scramble through each day. We collapse. And then we have to summon all of our energy to rise again and confront the next calamity, or climb the next obstacle, or face the next irritation.

There is always another responsibility. There is always something new to fix. Some broken artifact to fuse.

There is a slow moving shadow at the back of your brain. An old fear that echoes through you in anxious waves and reminds you of all you have not done. Perhaps that is the distant memory of that great and terrible falling tree.

We suffocate in the impending shadow. We suffocate in issue, obstacle, idea, iniquity, opportunity, possibility, expectation, responsibility. And the shadow just continues to lurch toward us. Always looming just overhead.