Lachesism

For a million years, we’ve watched the sky and huddled in fear. But somehow you still find yourself quietly rooting for the storm. As if a part of you is tired of waiting, wondering when the world will fall apart — by lot, by fate, by the will of the gods — almost daring them to grant your wish.

But really, you can wish all you want, because life is a game of chance. And each passing day is another flip of the coin.

You can’t help but take this life for granted. Your eyes adjust to the color of the walls and your ears tune out the chatter. As if your body’s trying to filter out the world as you know it.

And while your brain goes numb trying to shake off your complacency, your heart can’t sit still,
and your gut is hungry for chaos— itching to chase after storms and run headlong into the fire.
To watch society break down and find out what’s truly important and watch everything else fall away.

The apocalypse is one of the oldest fantasies we have, but it’s not about skipping to the end of the story. It’s a longing for revelation, a revealing of what we already know, but cannot see: that none of this is guaranteed and there’s no such thing as “ordinary life.”

That our civilization is just an agreement that could be revoked at any time. And beneath our rules and quarrels, we’re stuck together on a wide open planet, where anything can happen
leaving us no choice but to survive, to build a shelter, and find each other in the storm.

That even just getting through the day should feel like the miracle it is, a cascading series of accidents that just happened to fall your way.

But soon the storm will pass, and the world will go on spinning, and we’ll pick up our lives just where we left them, no more urgently than before. After all, it’s just life. It’s not the end of the world.

Coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a project, to create a compendium of invented words for every emotion we might all experience but don’t yet have a word for.

DANIELE BUSO