Striving Towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

What is mortality but consciousness borrowing time?
What is this life but a finite flame
Flickering against the infinite darkness,
Beautiful precisely because it cannot remain?

In the brevity lies the urgency of connection—
Each moment a universe that will never return.
To waste these precious hours in division
Is to burn the very light we came to learn.

We are temporary arrangements of stardust,
Brief symphonies in the cosmic silence.
Why spend our fleeting notes in discord
When harmony multiplies our resonance?

The earth that holds us spins through space
At incomprehensible velocity,
Yet we cling to petty grievances
As if we had eternity to waste in futility.

Death, the great equalizer, reminds us
That our differences are surface ripples
On the deeper ocean of shared being—
All waves returning to the same source, simple.

To choose unity is to acknowledge the paradox:
That only by transcending the illusion of separation
Do we truly inhabit our individual existence,
Only by joining do we find our unique station.

Time is not the enemy of meaning
But its most demanding teacher.
Each dawn asks: Will you love or resist?
Will you build bridges or barriers between creatures?

For in the end, what remains is not our arguments
But the love we dared to embody,
The harmony we chose to create
In our brief dance with the sacred and earthly.

We are both the eternal and the temporal,
Both the infinite and the achingly small.