To Be or Not to Be/The Boy becomes a Man

Altho Hamlets speech is supposed to be his contemplation of suicide I always saw more relevance of life in it.

At each point in life don't we ask the same question? To be a good person or not. To be a happy person or not. To be a doctor or not. To be a lover or not. To be a monk or not etc etc.

For when we chose not to do something do we kill that future self?

And what do we replace it with? Not another self, but with the NULL self and "we lose the name of action".

The question is then what lies in that "sleep of death", the abiding of that self which has turned against itself.

This morning I realise that if we do not attain that which we have chosen then we experience suffering. I have not attained that which I chose as deeply as my heart is deep. I would not have attained it because attain it or not, Death would have stolen it in only 9 years anyway.

But on that cold December afternoon as the sun was setting on Sloane Square, if I had not looked into her eyes and chosen her then I would not be mourning the death of a self at all. Had she worked in another store, turned a different corner, had I made my yeses at the other girls I worked with, this would never have happened. I heart made my bed but I didn't sleep in it and my heart has only itself to blame.

If I had chosen Death instead, and denied that temptation to fulfill my hearts deepest desire as I had every day until that moment when I was already 26, then I might now be 35 and still free from this pain.

The question to Be or Not to Be I am still contemplating as I did that day, but now I fear it is too late. I have chosen to Be, to accept mortal, finite reality as my bedrock and for that i will know suffering like the mermaid who desires to walk with morals: every step on broken glass. Can ther be a turning back to innocence, to a time when I was free, immortal, unafraid of the demon Death?

I do not know whether it is too late. Like a horse fighting its teather I am exhausted of this struggle to free myself of fetters. The moth in a room with a candle unable to escape the lure of that deadly flame. I do not even have the certainty that NULL was the way. Has the boy unavoidably become a Man?