The End is NEAR!

A man stands silently at a chaotic street corner.

Distracted businessmen hurry by in their rumpled suits, sweat-drenched dress shirts, and loosened ties. They stare at the ground, rapidly marching in procession toward their trains that will take them away from the city and the jobs they despise.

Hordes of tourists – students with their ripped jeans hanging low on their hips and graffiti all over their shirts – raucously shuffle by in herds, completely oblivious in their reverie to the world around them.

One of those teens loudly belts out a hip-hop song while others laugh and dance along. Another starts to beat box. The man on the corner doesn’t exist. They deserve all the attention. They suck up the city’s oxygen.

Businessmen glance up momentarily at the noisy teenagers, shake their heads, and continue their march.

“The End is NEAR!” the silent man’s cardboard sign professes.

His weathered skin; his balding, sunburned, heavily peeling scalp; and his long, wispy beard belie how relatively few times he has circled the sun in this lifetime. 

“They don’t understand. They never understand,” He mutters under his breath.

He is invisible.

A teen bouncing around and walking backwards while joking with his friends bumps into him, nearly knocking him over. The boy starts to at least pretend he’s going to say, “Excuse me,” only to burst out laughing when he sees it’s a crazy old man exuding an overwhelmingly putrid stench of homelessness.

The boy’s friends punch their buddy in the shoulder and stomach then point and laugh at the man, while the boy makes a repulsed face and brushes off the portion of his body that made contact to symbolically remove any traces.

“I never get through to them. Why can’t I ever get through to them?” the man mutters.

More throngs of people flow around him. Some crinkle up their faces in disgust. Most just ignore him. He’s a silent army of one.

A tourist walking by loudly declares to his wife, “Ugh, I hate these religious fanatics in the city.”

That draws a reaction.

“It’s not about religion!” the man shouts. “Your life is short! You better do something of value with it before you’re DEAD!”

“That’s not at all creepy,” the tourist states to his wife. She nods and shudders.

“If only they will understand. If I can make just one of them understand,” the man thinks to himself.

***********

This isn't the first time the man has roamed the Earth. It’s not his second time. In fact, he’s been back many times.

In his first lifetime, he was a criminal. He started out as a small-time petty thief. Over time, his misconduct escalated to bank robbery. Before he was done, he had murdered three accomplices in a fit of rage when he suspected them of hoarding his share of the loot from one of their biggest jobs. Off to prison he went, where he was inevitably stabbed to death by his cellmate who found him to be nothing more than an annoyance and an asshole.

Upon his death, he was informed on the other side that was not at all the expectation for what he was supposed to accomplish on Earth, and he would be forced to return for a ‘do-over’ to try to get it right.

***********

So back to Earth he went. But the man didn’t do much better in his second lifetime. To be fair, at least he didn’t choose a life of crime on his second go-around. But he carried the invisible scars from his first life and was a bitter, angry man, making everyone he encountered miserable.

As a child, he regularly threw punches at other boys in school. And sometimes even at the girls. He yelled at his co-workers when he found them incompetent at their jobs, which of course they all were. He argued incessantly with his supervisors, inevitably getting himself fired many times, which only exacerbated his anger with the entire world and everyone in it.

He died a worn out, 80-year-old man, alone in his tiny windowless apartment, where he wasn’t discovered for over two weeks until a terrible stench wafting through the hallway alerted neighbors of his demise. His next-door neighbor squeezed by in the narrow corridor as the coroner wheeled the man out in a body bag. “Good riddance,” the neighbor muttered under his breath.

When the man found himself on the other side once again, he was heavily chastised.

“Really? That’s the best you could do?”

“Hey, at least I didn’t kill anyone,” he replied with a shrug.

Their response? “Not. Good. Enough.”

***********

Back to Earth he was sent for one more attempt to accomplish something. Anything. Anything at all of value.

In his third attempt, he lived a dull, suburban life. He had his routine that never changed. He got up every morning. He went to work. He did his job just sufficiently enough to squeak by. Then he went home. He paid his bills. He had no friends. He spoke very little. And he accomplished very little. He marched through life treating it as nothing more than a chore.

“Just need to get through the day,” was his mantra.

His heart finally gave out one day, his head slumping down onto his desk. When the authorities came to remove him, none of his co-workers could even remember his name. HR had to be consulted. No one could find anyone to whom they should deliver a death notification. He was just…gone.

Upon his arrival in the afterlife once again, the souls just shrugged. They didn’t know what more they could do.

“He just doesn’t get it,” they whispered amongst themselves. “He’s never going to get it.”

***********

Back to Earth he was sent for a fourth attempt. But this time something had shifted in him. He finally understood he had a mission. A very important mission. He needed to inform the world full of people just shuffling through their lives (or committing crimes…or being assholes) that life is shorter than you think. It goes by in the blink of an eye. And everyone has a mission. Everyone must accomplish something. His mission was to inform everyone that you MUST have a mission. You need to accomplish something, anything for the greater good.

In this lifetime, as a child, other kids in school thought he was a total weirdo when he implored, “What are you going to do with your life? How are you going to make a difference?”

Then he mocked them when they responded inanely with, “I wanna be a rock star!”

“NO!” he yelled. “How are you going to change the world?”

“With my music…duhhhh!” they responded to his chagrin.

He kept trying all throughout his life, harassing colleagues and neighbors with questions like, “Yes, but what are you really doing for anyone else? Are you just making corporations richer? Are you just in it for money?”

The typical response was, “Uh, yeah. Obviously. I live in a big house. I drive a fast sports car. I cruise around the lake in my speed boat. I travel to tropical locales on vacation. I’m living the dream! So, uh, yeah.”

He rubbed enough people the wrong way that once again in this lifetime he frequently found himself unemployed and inevitably he ran out of money, ending up trying to survive on the streets, begging for scraps of sustenance.

But he hadn’t given up his mission yet. After months of living on the streets, he knew what he had to do. He found a stick, a piece of cardboard, and a charcoal burnt end of a piece of wood from a barrel where a fire had been lit to warm everyone else in his same predicament on a cold winter’s night, and in charcoal he scribbled, “The End is NEAR!” on the cardboard and weaved the stick through holes he had poked through it, creating a makeshift sign.

He was relieved to know he was finally going to accomplish his life’s mission. He would inform everyone that life is shorter than you think. It goes by in the blink of an eye. Your end is nearer than you think. And you only have one chance to get it right or you’re going to have to come back again until you get it right. (Or in his case, again, and again, and again, and maybe even again.)

He was thrilled with himself and convinced this was going to be his last time he was going to be forced to return to Earth. He had a mission to inform others. He was accomplishing it!

He soon learned, however, that no one cared. He was just one of many of the throngs of homeless crazy people to them.

“They hate me. They don’t get it. They’re never going to get it,” he sighed at the end of every long day on his street corner.

Finally, one day he attempted to cross the busy street to see if maybe people on the other side would “get it.”

“Maybe the grass is greener,” he said to himself with a chuckle.

But when he stepped off the curb, he failed to take notice of oncoming traffic and was struck by three vehicles and crushed to his death.

He entered the afterlife for his fourth time, exhausted and fed up.

The souls smiled wanly at him.

“You gave it your best shot,” they said. “You attempted to do something of value for others with your life.”

“Yes, but no one listened. What did I truly accomplish?” he sighed.

They responded, “Well, you tried. You really tried. But you’re going to have to go back one more time and really make a difference in your next lifetime. Remember, life is short. The end is always near.”

“How could I ever forget,” he muttered.

And on to his fifth lifetime he went…