Are you listening?

"If we choose not to decide, we still have made a choice..."

As a ghost, I walk through the corridors of life.

I look in from the outside as I pass through the barriers that would hold a normal man at bay. I travel unheeded through wall, window and door; floor, ceiling and roof. Instead, unseen barriers hold me to this unlife; keep me here where I can see all that I am missing without the ability to interact with it. My cries and queries are unheard by the living as they go about their routine.

They call out to me with their material voices seeking my council and answers I hold, and I answer to the ether, which carries my voice beyond. Would that they would heed my words if they could hear them at all. Rhetoric is the order of the day.

Here is the carried frustration at my need to either become beyond all this normal life or return to it. Do I search harder for that road to the clearing at the end of my life or do I stay here and search for the means to be with them again? Traversing the universe would certainly be preferable to wallowing in my past

Occasionally, some one notices the creaks and groans of my carried burdens as I pass, but rarely does the mortal notice more than a chill draft or odd tickling in the back of the mind. They are chained to their own burdens here and they do not shuck them off as they might before those weights press down on them forever.

Does it all become such as nothing to them? When you are gone, do not those who were here notice any more? It seems that only a few will, and yet fewer will care. They are enraptured with their own delights and disgusts. Their journey leads them further into their own minds. External experience is irrelevant, what can you teach them when they cannot see.

What is my unlife to those unaware of it? It was not their in their notice when in life, unless I intruded upon their own lives. No one is predisposed to include someone in their sufferings or joys without some return on the investment. We have become a closed society. "Do Not Disturb" signs come pre-installed on our psyches.

The "me" generation is specifically numb to the preternatural. They focus on their pitiful existance and ignore the existential. Outside of their senses there is nothing.

Those senses have improved over the ages: the computer, television, satellite communications, portable telephones. They just do nothing to improve the pointed nature of the information parsed. If anything, they are no better than bored housewives leaning over an electronic fence post. Centuries pass, but the nature of communication doesn't. Rumor travels faster than truth and is more likely to be believed.

Complaints hold more weight than the best recommendations. Personal experience passes and only the worst is passed with speed, if not reliability.

But instead of listening to those things they truly search for, they rain against their own self-deluding nature and complain that no one has told them the things they need to know. They ignore the world around them in a search for the things beyond their grasp. Human nature has not changed, only the spaces they live in and the ways they communicate their meager misinterpretations has.

I whisper to them as they sleep, then they hear me and comprehend the answers they seek but as waking bombards them with misinformation and propaganda, nothing is retained.

Perhaps it is time that my ethereal footsteps begin to lead me towards the end of the great Red Road, where I can find peace and convey my learnings to my ancestors. Perhaps they will listen and learn from my mistakes, instead.