Awakening To a New Kind of Fulfillment
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
October 17, 2009

I was in a hiatus since awakening this AM.  After an attack from my illness over the last couple of days, I am starting to feel better, but not quite up to a birdie, much less par, and therefore still lacking the oomph necessary for thinking and writing.  I tried expanding on the topic of neurotransmitters and structures but my feeble efforts made me leave that course for the pastures reserved for worn-out studs.  Well, perhaps another day! 

Mulling over my work for which you had awarded me such gracious accolades, it began to dawn on me that, while writing is my one remaining avocation and, moreover, recreation, my essays are like the chirps of tiny sparrows flitting out into the planet’s vast blue atmosphere.  As this sparrow, my tiny environs are inhabited by a miniscule number of birds of a feather, not flocked together in the trees or on the wing in our windy coverlet, but tenuously connected by cyberspace. 

Most likely, my writings, my little chirps, at best, provide a minor and possibly even fleeting source of knowledge and insight to my cyber friends.  In reality, they are probably more a form of evanescent entertainment. 

Oddly, my main contribution to my fellow humans may be the bit of cheer my momentary smiles, positive comments, and acknowledge of them as being of enough worth that I would take the time to say their name if it is on a name tag or notice what they are doing or buying and sharing a common interest in it.  That is my meaning in life.  That brief validation of the ‘Other’s’ value as a fellow human being has become my own sense of reward, meaning, and fulfillment.  Not some grand program I have implemented or attainment of a goal set by an institution, no, rather it is the mutual heartwarming of one another as strangers we pass by on the last, lonely road of life that is relegated to rest of humanity that has been let out to pasture.  Ironically, I have begun to see how precious that is to me and seems to be to my fellow ‘nobodies’.  We are nobodies together and, yet, as such we become somebody’s due to that simple but cosmically important bond as fellow creatures of the earth.  We are stripped down to our basic humanity, no longer capable of, nor obliged to, being respecters of ‘personages’ based on official labels or the superficial trappings of status.

The glamour and glitter of vain social comparisons in bustling elevators of that grand façade of society no longer blinds me to the incomparably greater value that has come from seeing the laid bare, primitive, humanity that is common to us all.  That last, vast, lonely road of life suddenly seems populated with the mass of humanity, only the glare-blinded eyes of most of that mass have a ways to go before they see their, and our, true naked humanity.