Urning a Living

He had a treasure box where he kept everything he'd lost. He resisted reappraising them because it was the past.

Rummaging through it would be like trying to translate Homer into Tarot, neither medium in his wheelhouse. How could things from his past be translated with the language of things to come? Things in his past were written in a dead language; things in his future still hid in probability clouds, awaiting sublimation.

His box of things lost was expanding. He had constantly lost things, for without loss there is no growth--each item in his box an education. He grew wiser as his treasure box expanded. He didn't know if it'd be the box--or--himself that might burst first.

He wondered: Can I search, in the box of things lost, for my future? Aren't they entangled in mutual duality?

His future lay unassembled in his box like an evanescent mist, but one can't see the future while in its fog. But without things lost, confronted, and forgiven, under the lock and key of perspective, the future cannot be.

When opening his treasure box, its carillon played the song of his future--intangible but orchestrated via expectation. Which would please the ears more--his past or future?

Things in the box, lost, then seducing all the things yet to fall into it, were a continuum--the things lost sequestered away as much as things to come: he could look but couldn't touch. As much a part of his life the past things in that box were, the future was as much a sine qua non of his life, whether the carillon played harmonically or discordantly.

The past was dead, interesting in the way a dead language is--important, yet irrelevant; the future was nascent and growing--but relevant. There's a fine line between relevant and irrelevant.

It oscillates.

When he died, he was cremated; his treasure box burned, too. His entire ash continuum--a life's summary unfettered by time--combined into how he'd remain in perpetuity. His past and future, as indistinguishable from each other as his ashes were from him, recapitulated everything he'd learned from life on planet Earth. All his data, in those ashes, would fertilize the Earth for the things to come.