March 16, 2013

• Tomorrowland

  Why does life have to be so big?

  Why do these little units of life – moments – have to build up over time into things so towering?

  
  

  A moment always seems innocent. It is just a moment. But they build and they build and the build. Soon you are overwhelmed at the picture they form. A huge picture of a person or a nation or a war – or biggest of all – a life.  And at the heart of it is just this little thing, a moment.  

  
  

  They welcome you as a mesmerizing light, an enchanting finger beckoning us through the dark.  We follow. We capture it. But as soon as we do, we find it reappears a few feet away. We follow again. Soon we are lost in the caverns, but it leads us up to a cliff and we see the juncture where we started, and in the tangled maze surrounding thousands of other waving fingers, flickering in the dark.  

  
  

  Just a moment. A small moment. Every hero and every villain once a child. Just a child.  

  
  

  Growth. We peg so much of our lives under the header of ‘growth’. But this is just newspeak for time and people we have lost.  For the tragedy of unpredictable misconceptions we had. For the fact that the world not only surrounds us, but it has us surrounded. It is a word that masks under a terry cloth the pain of childhood.  

  
  

  The pain is assumed, and we know if we looked at it head on we would wilt. So instead we nod and look into the fire and say ‘I grew a lot in that time’.     

  
  

  It’s so big. 

  
  

  There’s always an emotion you couldn’t know you’d have to work through. An emotion is not even a stable thing. Each emotion, just when you think you have it down, changes when you go to a new place. Every emotion is one cause with many effects; each effect comes out when combined with a new place in your life.  And as you pick up more and more emotions, they each pick up new effects, until the point when you go places you do not even know what you are feeling. All you know is you are feeling so much.

  
  

  It is so big; Augustine, you were right! 

  
  

  Every personality has a hidden philosophy underlying it. Between all their scenes, their beliefs about goodness will come out here, a certain emotion there, an understanding of what causes what in the world in another place – but connecting all these will be a very specific idea. And only that person knows that idea. But they do not even know they know it; it is the natural intuition about life that each person has, so very different from every other, so very much thinking it is right, and yet so very much just one option among countless others. And between all that goes into it, the undefinable intuition at the heart of it, and the element of openness, of choice to the world, there is no way of knowing what will happen.  

  
  

  I may think it is a good thing to make another person laugh, but only under certain circumstances. If I am on one of my reading days, maybe I will think it is not right to make someone laugh. It did not have to be this way; I could very well be a person who thinks reading days require the most laughter of all. Thus my personality is woven with this stitch, and it will inform my actions, but the stitch is invisible, and it does not even have a necessary logic to it. Such is the randomness that composes humans! And yet we all believe its foundation sure. When we feel suddenly drawn to do an action, when we feel it is the thing for us to do, we think “but of course! It could not be any other way!”

  
  

  So many millions of stitches, so unnecessary their nature, so invisible they are to our daily eyes.  

   

  And yet when they all come together between two people, they form a moment, an innocent creature, a solitary flower in a field; it never tells them all that went into it, or all that will come of it.  We live on top of an invisible mountain, the past, and before an invisible wilderness, the future, seeing something so small, save for the flashes of time when we see it all and think, it is too big, it is too much. 

   

  Too much for me.

  • 11:32 pm
  • 4 Comments