Kilroy J. Oldster

Death does not mark the end of a chapter in a man__ life, but the end of a book of man, the beautiful conclusion to his yearnings.

When people pass on we must choose how to remember them. While our loved ones sleep for eternity we must carry on with our daily toil. We can elect to harbor adoration and love in our precious memories or cling to animosity and detestation. We can kindly remember our ancestors or continue to feel embedded enmity towards people who no longer walk this earth. Regardless the human frailties of the recently departed, it seems that we should aspire to clutch the best part of our ancestors being fast to our hearts. A book encapsulating a departed person__ life has many pages; we must choose which chapters to treasure and what chapters to disregard or downplay.

The tragedy of life is not death, but fearing to live, allowing parts of us to wilt and die instead of flower and rejoice.

A principled life begins by accepting the evident truth that we must die. Death becomes us. Knowledge of the impermanence of our existence reassures us that how we live does make a difference. Because our allotted time for living is finite, we must make the most of each day.

Time is quixotic because it can torment us. When we have insufficient stimulus to fill our lives, we resent the relentless quality of time, and we engage in activities designed to __ill time._ Time that passes slowly creates insufferable boredom; time that passes to quickly makes us aware of our accelerated death march. A person__ perspective on time depends mostly on what they are most afraid of, boredom or death.

Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.

Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations.

Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer__ is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times.

By applying their observational abilities along with full appliance of their logic and creative powers, writers attempt to create mental maps to share with other people regarding what they learned, think, and believe. The writer__ vision can sway readers emotional state and in doing influence what they believe and how they behave.

A writer must be willing to leave oneself behind in order to explore new territories of the mind and unearth primordial truths that startle and frighten us.

Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person__ own precursors: it revises a person__ conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the __ow,_ and alters the course and outcome person__ future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person__ thoughts, debunk a person__ delusion, and analyze a person__ values.

Personal essay writing is analogous to undertaking a vision quest, a potential turning point in life taken to discover intimate personal truths, form complex abstract thoughts, and ascertain the intended spiritual direction of a person__ life.

When I write, I enter a transpersonal state of consciousness, a lightheaded realm of mental imagination, a cognitive place where I can lithely finger the coherent and the absurd. I seek to cross over an intricate boarder where the conscious and unconscious minds meet, traversing the aperture where the real and the imaginary intermingle. I aspire to establish a detached vantage point where I can survey the entire human condition.

Original sin and conscious awareness of human fallibility is the perpetual agent of transformation in human affairs. Humankind__ behavior is pathological; it is an admixture of instinct and reason, kindness and cruelty, immorality and seeking redemption.

Drinking caffeinated drinks including high potency energy drinks, and consuming other enablers, we do not need to develop an internal source for the energy, effort, endurance, and enthusiasm needed to confront each day.

Many life-affirming questions lead to an endless spool of disconcerting propositions and contradictory conclusions, and even more troubling, some queries prove unanswerable.

The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person__ personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person__ sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author__ own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person.

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence.