I don't know why, but my mind's eye keeps imagining headless chickens running around an open empty space, thankfully there are no sounds on these images, so I can only watch with a mixture of horror and fascination that doesn't quite resolve into either emotion cleanly.
I also don't think I've come across much material about headless chickens be it figuratively or something along those lines.
Not sure if this metaphor for sustained purposeless motion has made much headway into mainstream consciousness, which seems a bit odd given how it captures something we all experience yet rarely name, i.e purposeless action.
If I try to associate with the visceral discomfort of the image, it's a specific kind of haunting that comes from realizing one is performing over something already dead, say a relationship where the essential intimacy evaporated months before anyone said the words.
I wonder how long the average duration is between the fatal moment and the final collapse for all the things we keep animated through sheer momentum.
The biological reality is grimly straightforward, it seems the spinal cord doesn't need the brain for basic motor function at least for a brief amount of time after the former has separated from the latter, pure reflex I guess.
Upon further thought, what nods really about this image is how it maps onto aspects of the human experience, which in this case is the gap between when something ends and when we accept it ended.
A close example here is a business venture that started losing viability eighteen months ago when the market shifted, still the founders keep holding weekly strategy meetings, networking at industry events and performing the rituals of a living enterprise over what is functionally a corpse.
The decisive moment tends to pass without much recognition, no clear before and after, just a gradual realization, sometimes months or years delayed, that the thing you've been sustaining through effort and routine stopped being genuinely alive at some point you can't quite pinpoint.
Needless to say, I've done the same thing with plans made in a previous version of myself that the current version keeps executing out of obligation to past intentions.
Also, I'm realizing that the gap between the end and stopping isn't some rare malfunction and is closer to the default state of how things actually operate.
Most endings aren't clean.
The chicken doesn't know it should fall, it lacks the apparatus to process its own termination. And I'm not convinced we're much better equipped most of the time.
Better to somehow keep running since stopping would require a kind of knowledge that only arrives in retrospect, if it arrives at all.
Which means a lot of life happens in this headless chicken state, executing routines and pursuing trajectories while the question of whether any of it still makes sense remains perpetually deferred.
Depending on pov, it's actually less bleak than it sounds initially.
I think once I acknowledge that we're all running around with varying degrees of decapitation, the pressure to have everything figured out starts to dissipate. Add to it that if meaning and direction were prerequisites for action, most of human activity would probably grind to a halt.
Nothing is guaranteed to matter and yet here we are, full sprint, so we might as well make it interesting while the momentum lasts.
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