Sentience

Is it a blessing or a curse to know we are born to die? Should we rejoice, be thankful for feeling time's blood passing through our lives, or do we regret our ever aging bodies as skin thins and joints creak like unoiled hinges on a front door of an old house soon abandoned? This knowing, this ever knowing... why is but one species out of millions so blessed-- or has it just been burdened, so heavy with that unending sense of good, of evil, permeating each life, a cognizance honed by our early sins and petty wrongs, those child-born regrets? And why must we always see the gap, sometimes a sliver, but often a chasm between what is & what should, could be? Why are we never satisfied? Why are we never done? What, or Who gave us this nagging, incessant, relentless awareness, and why? For is it not found in every unhappy involvement... the failed marriage, an estranged child, the bitter, lost traitor? Does it not torment the mind of the suicide plunging into a river in a vain attempt to escape this very personal, unique, most singular 'gift'? Yet gift it is-- for we are the judging animal, the weighing animal, always measuring, asking, seeking, hungering-- never satisfied....