aspiration

To aspire is to direct one's hopes or ambitions toward achieving something. It comes from the Latin verb aspirare which is comprised of the prefix ad which means “to” and the root spirare which means “breathe.” To breathe, then, should be to aspire. Why else take a breath? If the point of taking a breath is to sustain oneself long enough to merely take another breath then the entire process is rather futile, is it not? So why do we not all aspire?

It seems to me that the overwhelming majority of us let our volitional fluid—that which acts as the necessary and sufficient conditions for active aspiration—coagulate into a synthetic polymer, an unyielding epoxy, by our late teens. Epitomes of obduracy, we add-on liars justify our haphazard formation with dizzyingly dexterous oscillations between outright denial and the stealthy subterfuge of rationalization. We strive but we do not aspire. We strive with herculean effort to maintain what we've inherited, gleaned, absorbed, garnered, accepted, and otherwise obtained. We find ourselves thrust into being already in possession of dogmatically held opinions for better or worse. Our fears and desires are bound up with these views yet we dare not look too closely at them lest we find them unfavorable. Perhaps this is the greatest fear of modern man: to realize that he is not individual, that he is not the progenitor of that which he champions, and that upon closer examination, that which he thought to taste so sweet is nothing short of saccharin saturated scheisse.