Jade Bile

I wrestle with the concept of a soul.   Being the staunch agnostic that I am, I cannot accept the soul as the ethereal image that ascends to heaven or plummets to Hell.  Still, there must be something that accounts for individuality.  Identical twins with identical DNA (raised is the same home, going to the same school and so on) can grown to lead dramatically different lives.  Perhaps there is a biological explanation, lost in the 4/5 of our brain that is not in active use.  Maybe the lightning that dances across our synapses carries some lingering residual of its journey from the big bang to our bodies.  We simply have yet to develop a method of discerning such a thing.  Regardless, human beings are as the proverbial snowflakes: no two have ever been the same, nor shall ever two be.  This is how I envision the soul and I have simply given too much of mine away.  Whether it was to make a dollar, spare a feeling or obey the rules as written; the grains of myself have slid carelessly from my hand in the desert of modern life.  Do I possess certain utterly useless skills as a result?  Indubitably.  I can make small talk with idiots and show respect to cretins.  For the most part, I am able to hold in my cries of anguish and rage.  Only now, with such a threadbare blanket of myself remaining, do I recognize that not one among us has any duty to world at large.  If I do not make my unique values, my happiness paramount, then no one will.  We must all do what we must do.  Society will respond however it may, yet always, to quote the bard, to thine own self be true.  Having little to show for an adulthood spent in truth to others, this course on which I must embark will be in the certain veracity of self.  Damn me, if you will.