"Is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?  Losing control or are you winning?  Is your life real or just pretend?"
     So asks the rock/heavy metal band Black Sabbath in one of the songs on its latest album, the first album it has released in many years.  Without trying to divine why the band is asking such questions, as much of their writing (like that of the Rolling Stones, a fact to which Mick Jagger has admitted repeatedly) is designed to titillate and does not always represent how they really feel, we can nonetheless consider what, if we ourselves are asking such questions for our lives, these words mean.
     As the band points out, so many people hover on the edge of sentient existence, constantly wondering what their lives are for, constantly stepping into life as a struggle, a relentless struggle against seemingly insuperable odds, a desperate effort to keep afloat.  As a result, just as many people try, in turn, to control as much of their lives as they can, to do whatever they can to "win," so that they can insist to themselves that their lives are not so much the "beginning of the end" but the "end of [a constantly emerging and ever glorious beginning."  People want their lives to be real, vastly and impenetrably and mysteriously (for in truth they are such things) real.  They do not wish to think that life is just an illusion, a pervasive maya, a figment of our churning imagination.
     Oddly enough, however, unless we stop trying to control life, it may well continue to be an illusion, not necessarily a physical one, but certainly resident in the depths of our minds.  We are finite; we will never control the caprice of the infinite, the unpredictability of a seemingly limitless and transcendent existence.  Never.  And if by some miracle we do, we will have only succeeded in surmounting edifices that we ourselves have built.  We will have solved nothing.
     Life means nothing, really, unless it is lived in the awareness that its beginning, and its end, are in fact rooted in a meaningfulness from which we should not run--for where would we run to?--but instead embrace, because it is only in this meaningfulness that we find the reason we can think we are real and are not, as the Smashing Pumpkins put it, running around like rats in a cage.
     In other words, how else can we suppose that we are "here" if there's nothing here anyway?