Establishing a Reason

Upon reflection, I find my gaze has always kept its edge, critical.
The absurdity in so many things catches my eye, and I can hardly bear it.
Without being able to offer any alternatives,
I only raise my voice to say that something is wrong.
I can't make the world any better for it.
Maybe it's nothing more than a discontented complaint.
In the end, I'm left as someone closed-off and combative.
Then is the opposite true — that settling in, always holding onto positivity, is the right answer?
That doesn't seem right either.

Among the things Yoo Si-min once said, one line has stayed with me.
It was something along the lines of: "Everything is mind-made — the path lies somewhere between that and social criticism."
I liked it.
Social criticism and religious peace are ideas that can't easily coexist, yet they need to be brought into proper balance.
The moment you tip too far to one side and become blind to everything else,
you lose sight of "yourself."

Seeing "myself" clearly matters a great deal.
Because this world
begins from me,
is the entirety of my world,
and the center of the whole world, the whole universe,
is none other than "me."
Everyone has their reasons.
Reasons exist to explain so many things,
but I've come to think that "reason" itself might just be a mirage that was never really there.

Someone asks why you eat.
You answer that it's because you're hungry, or to survive,
to supply your body with nutrients.
Then they ask why you eat in order to live —
which is really asking for the reason to live at all.
At the end of every "why," there was no conclusion waiting.
Everyone simply manufactures a reason, or a justification, of their own.

Life means that "I" exist,
and that means I need something to hold onto.
The law of universal gravitation.
Just as a force always acts between two objects,
for me to exist within life I need a reason for living, and I can only be sustained by being bound to it.
That must be why we love to invent reasons.
It's the action and reaction of being alive.

This is my answer to the reason for 'searching for a reason.'
So looking at "myself" matters enormously —
because every reason begins from "me."

Searching for the reasons behind so many things, or inventing them —
that, I think, is life itself.

If blindness keeps you from seeing "yourself,"
you may be alive in the physiological sense,
but you can't be said to be truly living.

So today, too, I'll stand in that in-between space,
and for the sake of happiness, or to savor it,
I'll go on searching for a reason.