How do I give life meaning? Not “What is the meaning of life” but how to create meaning? Why am I still asking this question at 47? I already know the answer and have known it for some years now. It is through connections and relationships, like the synapses between neurons, not the neurons themselves. The neurons are just nodes that can be replaced, although replacing one with many synapses or one with strong synpases is difficult and painful and sometimes just not possible (Adamcik, Cohen, Berman, Kelly, Mishniewicz, Owens, Schaier, Jung, Appel. Appel. Of course, Appel. Trobman, Glassman, Harrison). I know this but don’t want it to be so, and that is why I still search for another way. I want to be Crusoe on his island. Then I remember that even Crusoe had Man Friday and an invisible synapse between.

How do I not stop time but savor each moment and then, at its sweetest or most bitter, record it so I can relive it. I remember learning about God’s Book of Life, wherein all moments of all lives are recorded and God, in his wooden throne among the clouds, pages through the Book during times of judgement. Can I have a copy of my chapter?

I have memories of my mother, but they are sparse and impressionistic. And at her end, I wanted her to die because there would be sympathy for me. It is selfish and evil. It is a jet engine drowning the other sounds of her memory. Already two weeks ago feels like 20 years as I am deluged by the consciousness of the moment and the impending fatalism of the forthcoming. I need my chapter.

I watch little Max growing up and each breath he takes kills me. Again and again. It’s not murder and it’s not suicide but it’s the natural order. It’s not a transfer of my life to his; there is no zero-sum, yet he grows and I diminish. It’s painless but perhaps the saddest thing I’ve known, perhaps even more than my mother’s death. But I wouldn’t know because I can’t remember that pain. I need my chapter.

On the bright side, I have no regrets so far. Our synapse is like a steel cable, and I am present more than any other father I’ve ever known.

I need my chapter, but I don’t always want it and sometimes I fear it. What if my present and future cease as I spend the rest of my days reliving the past, until I got to the point in the chapter where I’m just reading and re-reading, ad infinitum, like the reflection of a mirror in a mirror.

Back to work. Somehow.