183. Until I No Longer Can

Another hour has vanished. I stare at the clock in disbelief, but the time is correct. An entire hour is gone, and I have done nothing. Time is passing quickly not because I’m fruitfully occupied but because I’m completely distracted.

My mind is in the grip of a single thought and all of its efforts are directed towards examining, exploring, and investigating that thought. It is the thought that something is missing. I do not know what this something is or even what it could be. My inability to pin it down is part of the problem. When I try to locate it, I get nowhere. Everything I come up with only circles this unknown point.

There is something missing and I need it. I feel this need desperately, but how can I need something I cannot even identify? My desperation encourages further rumination, it provides me with endless motivation to go on searching and questioning. But I find nothing. I’m no closer to an answer than when I began.

This realization should deter me, but it doesn’t. Surely it would be better to give up and do something — anything at all — but I can’t bring myself to abandon the search. I’ve become obsessed with the problem, with the unknown thing that is missing. I’m obsessed because I feel like I cannot live without it, like my entire existence depends on discovering it.

A day is not long but terrifyingly short from this place of unlimited rumination, searching, and striving to reach what cannot even be located. The hours pass one after the other, and at the end of each one I’m still the same.

Despite the passage of time, my desire for an answer remains unperturbed. It seems bottomless, as though I could follow it deeper and deeper until the end of time itself, and still there would be more. If the thing I desire cannot be located, then the desire itself cannot be satisfied. I know this makes sense, but even logic cannot stop me. I will continue to seek the missing thing until I no longer can.