Erosion

Life has a way of eroding everything, good or bad. A man stumbles out of a hospital immediately after the death of his wife. Still the traffic lights change from red to green to yellow. Still cyclists pedal down the right lanes. Still turn indicators flicker. The world moves and wears individuals down as surely as water droplets do mountains. Even in our personal worlds, weathering is constant. A woman accepts a man's proposal, is thrilled, darts about making plans, is disappointed with her honeymoon, doesn't like the color of her bedroom walls, and lives to loath her husband. If the world was a person, we'd call her fickle. If life was a will, we'd call it capricious.
How can we have peace if there's no place to rest? What humanity needs are fixed points in the midst of flux. Could a person maintain concentration long enough to invent fixed points himself? No. Humans lack the necessary tenacity. How can people endure starvation then? A common strategy is to give oneself over to the flux which, in effect, gives the sensation of running on a treadmill. The contrary motions collude to create an illusion of stillness. A woman places her foot down on what feels like solid ground (she invests herself in a political campaign, for instance). But the surface is moving (the election comes and goes), and so she thrusts her other foot forward (she tries her hand at running a business). In all of this striding, she can look to the left and right and see the same walls. She thinks, "I have remained the same, and so has what matters." In truth, she is delusional. She has constantly expended her energy in different locations and has nothing to show for it but a demise in sweat and exhaustion, being flung off the track, and being hurled into the stillness of oblivion.
Even a man's memory is an agent of erosion. How many moments in a single day are lived through and discarded without ennobling it by lodging it in the mind? How many moments which a the time seem unforgettable and yet could never be recalled some months later. Time adds water to all the potent tastes of life. It tarnishes the shiny brass of love and rusts the defiant sheen of iron.