I fear wading in waters too deep

I wake up some mornings - lately, a lot - and I don't even know why I should roll out of the rack. This morning while I was trying to think of a reason, I thought, This doesn't augur well for your future. I mean, I'm still "young" and - wow, it's horrible that I have to put quotes around that word - healthy and-- well, my future stretches out in front of me but it's a shorter stretch now, isn't it?

I thought, You need to have a reason for living. And of course Maya is the first reason. But she can't be the only one, and I don't have her with me now, or half the time.

I literally feel like I'm getting up some mornings because I'm alive, and when you're alive, you get up.

So I'm inching up on a greater purpose question here. Is there something I can do, something I'm meant to do, and I don't like using that word with its sense of pre-destination, but for lack of a better term... Where am I getting my meaning?

And I'm writing this here and now because I just watched an episode of Rescue Me and there's a great monologue at the end of the episode where Sheila talks about the death of her husband and I felt her, this fictional character, and cried a little, and thought That's what I can do. I can write something that makes people feel.

Because for some reason I think that's worth something. It's why I wanted to be a reporter, it's why I always wrote - so somebody else would feel something. So that yes, there was this sense of our common humanity - and that's important and meaningful to me. I think that's why Buddhism appeals to me too - because this life is shared, even if we feel we are experiencing it alone. If I focus on the shared experience - literally, that I am not separate from you or you or you, from the ocean or the trees or even that magazine on the nightstand - do I even need to find meaning? Isn't it just that meaning is?