A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE BOUNCE

December 9th, 2018

Lucilius was sitting on a park bench in the city in a purely dismal state.  A large company he had slowly built over a number of years had come to a disastrous end when everything seemed to crumble from beneath.  ‘Unforeseen market forces’ was the pithy and official statement, until further notice.  Dark thoughts were filling his mind as huge portions of his brain’s neural network that had been built and devoted to the project were suddenly experiencing severe down regulation due to sudden irrelevance and the retroactive imaginative planning required to try and make sense of large mistakes in the face of a need to feel certainty.  Lucilius’ mediation habits were on a long hiatus – a further cost of the now failed endeavor, and so he was not acutely aware of this whole reality.  He could only see and feel the consuming and gnawing feeling of utter failure.

It was a beautiful spring day, but Lucilius was unable to notice any of it’s splendor.  He merely sat watching the lay of his undone shoelace draped across his fine and shiny shoe.

His dismal reverie was cleaved by a sudden thud and clack of metal.  He looked up to see a young boy on the brick walkway, a small bicycle strewn next to him.  The boy was silent, looking at his situation.  He peeled his hands from the walkway and looked at his scuffed palms, inspecting them.  He tentatively rubbed them together to clear the dirt as his mother came up to him.

“honey, you ok?”

“Yep, I try again.”

The kid got up, lifted his bicycle and mounted it.  He looked forward and pushed the bicycle, trying to catch the peddles.  He fell again, checked himself and giggled some.

“You wanna be done for today sweetie?”  The boy’s mother asked.

“No, a little more.  Then we’ll come back and do more tomorrow.”

Lucilius watched the young boy continue off with his mother walking along and watching.  He’d forgotten about his own situation during the whole interlude and now it was all soaking back into his mind.  The dread and dark worry, the sheer open ended feeling that arose from a blank tomorrow.  The young boy’s words echoed in his mind, and slowly something began to rise through all that Lucilius was feeling.  After a moment, while staring at his untied shoe, he giggled.  He looked up at the trees coming into blossom, the bright sky spilling between the branches and the fresh air moving across his skin.  He hiked up his foot to the bench and tied his shoe.  Got up and walked back into the concrete jungle, slowly shaking his head with a smile.