Scientists and great thinkers tell us that we live in a universe completely oblivious to our condition. It"s not that it's out to get us, but that it does not play favorites. It is perhaps their way to stick it in to their theological counterparts. Because I find it hard to believe that an uncaring universe will somehow device at least a third of the conditions favorable to harvest life. I'm not saying the universe did a great job either. It could've been far more accommodating. It's hard to complain too, either way. You can imagine the universe say, forget those humans, or all the other animals, but make sure they have plenty of water, oxygen and a nice horizon. Take a small chunk away from the existential repertoire and it would spell doom. Say, for instance, that we extract the moon from the equation. We would have minutes to live. Say something on a much more smaller scale, like bees, and we got a few weeks to start dying off by the millions.
I guess the universe is more like women: many things altogether, everywhere at once and yet in no place to be found, just like the particles coming in and out of existence. We observe how polarities complement one another, so it's night just day & night, but midafternoon and dawn. It is said that night is darkest just before daylight but I've never seen darkness go to shining bright in a blink, like clicking a switch; it's a gradual, awestruck sequence of moments. Sunsets got nothing compared to sunrises: the former's waving a timid farewell; the latter's a welcoming with open arms. Light fading into darknesss is how stars end; light branching out of the deepest obscurity is how it all began. Men are darkness; women, the light. We complement one another, and wouldn't make sense apart. It seems contradictory but nothing's separate from anything. We're all at once death and life, light and darkness, noise and silence. How could we ever dream of being alone?
They may seem to be indifferent to us from the start and nature devised a wondrous mechanism to make them fall in line: we cry. If anything precedes good sleep in babies when all other needs are met is a good cry. Why, isn’t that one of the reasons women outlive us? They also play aloof and, as it is well known, only one of the panda twins will be nurtured by mother, because nature’s a bitch. You know human mothers too secretly had their favorite. Some of us are stout and proud, and so naturally inclined on a chauvinistic streak. Just like momma panda, we had no choice but to be choosy. Isn’t that why employees must take lessons on biases, deeply rooted within us?
To us men, women seem abstract and incomprehensible, to say the least. But we best not dare raise such concerns. You knew, whether you were a boy or a girl, who the softy parent was, learned to leech off their weaknesses to get your way, and watch your step around the austere one. In most cases, mom played the role of the villain, the original bad boss; they knew us best. It wasn’t letting us get our way what will eventually lead us into finding our way. Marriages worked best when the parental roles were well defined, and when women found themselves holding things down. It’s only when the roles aren’t well thought out that there are discrepancies, and not just at home but everywhere in life. Nothing wrong with a little conflict but more than overpowering others, the ideal way out is leading from within. You need to be in control of your own self if you want to instill in a sense of direction in others. And it’s not always the one doing the shouting, or the one who caves in easily, but the one to withstand the storm tactfully. So, mom may seem a bit unsteady but she’s just stressed the fuck out. Men may develop their intuitive proclivities by reigning in their impulses. You’ll see that it wasn’t indifference on her behalf, but a cry for help, a patient step, a quiet nod, a generous act, an unsuspected kindness. It saves us all to learn how to play along and see things impersonally, like someone watching a movie may be taken by a character’s role but never lose perspective: it’s not happening and it’s not real. Like a bystander may be better suited at assisting a person who has suffered an injury than the injured party would ever be. A physician who treating him or herself has a fool for a patient, they say. And so we can extricate ourselves from the situation so long as we remain whole in what our premise should be under any given circumstance: aim at keeping your cool. Extract yourself from the equation by not adding to the madness.
Yes: women seem unaware of us. Not just as mothers, but later on when our hormones kick in and we find ourselves irrevocably drawn to them. If only back then we had instilled in us the sense what it must’ve been like for them, to be surrounded by a pack of horny puppies following them around. It’s time management, I say: you simply lack the time and energy to reciprocate all the goodness coming off your way. It’s not indifference, and it’s not solely the property of females. On a far lower scale, men suffer it. But since women aren’t naturally throwing themselves at our feet or whistling and catcalling us everywhere we go, then it becomes more bearable. Envy does exist, so it’s not only suitors desirable elements have to watch out for but rivals and rivalries. Rivals, often of the same sex, will leverage the odds by unfair means. How could they otherwise be competitive, especially if they cannot rely on their charm? Rivalries derive from their tactics in predispositions, in the form of gossip, defamation, etc. Envy, unlike kinship, has many faces. But it’s not so hard to spot. You just gotta play your hand right and one of the uncanny moves to adopt in order to fend off the onslaught is indifference. Not in a highly lethal dose, but in a tactful, impeccable way that sets you apart from bigotry and idolatry. See: idolatry translates into ass-kissing and bigotry is basically the opposite: licking your own ass. You don’t want to find yourself on any one of these ends.
Indefference, therefore, is her way of saying: try harder. But, of course, not in quantitative terms: you don’t insist. Instead, you persist. It’s not that our mothers and subsequent girlfriends and significant others did not love us. Like an indifferent universe, in a quantitative state of flux, they did/didn’t, they do/don’t and will/won’t at once depending on the position in time and space you observe it from. They may love hating you or hate you for loving you. It’s strange, I know. But only because you’ve been sharpening that logic tool that’s only good in making sense. So, let’s make sense of this. It roughly translates into your own state of mind. It is why when we really decide to let things slide and simply move on, without the slight shred of emotion, we attract them. But sometimes when we are bent on chasing them, it repels them. It’s sort of like the dog chasing its tail: the moment it decides to walk right straight on, its tail follows it everywhere.
Hadn't they nurtured us from the start, we wouldn't be here. We forget women are part of the equation in this game of polarization. And let's not take it to heart either, as in a sexism; instead, it's the dance between femininity and masculinity. You don't have to be a dance instructor in order to know that, in a dance one follows and the other leads. And we may learn our first moves from a woman, so it has nothing to do with a chauvinistic stance.
That said, I just want to come out and say that... I fucking love women.
Who would want to inhabit a world without them anyway? But I'm using them as an analogy. They seem impervious to us. But they're not. Just like the universe.
It is often said that God is a woman. What did ancient societies do with women of wisdom, knowledge? Burn them at the stake. If anything, the universe is far more magical than logical. Men of genius had to device a way to measure the world around more precisely than language ever could. Language is vague, and so mathematics was the more effective alternative.
Quantum physics is mathematics on steroids. It tells us of a world that just doesn’t respond to logic, a universe far more mindboggling in its complexities. It is as if it were closer to witchcraft or magic. It isn’t linear, its narrative is capricious and at its core it defies our wildest calculations. It may be that men of knowledge simply suck at defining with precision what can only be intuitively grasped for a moment, before it disappears, turning into something other. You only have to see erudite males at a social gathering: they find themselves roughly out of place. What if the universe turns out to be more like a dance and less like an equation? Have a look at how the first modern thinker, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, described our condition as if we were rapidly improvising and moving along without a chance to stop, no time to calculate anything, as pulled downwards by gravity, running downhill. It is strange that as much influence as he clearly derived from buddhism, he doesn’t mention meditation. It’s unlikely that he practiced it, as it may have been too esoteric a discipline to adopt. But that’s only speculation. What really seems to lack is a more proper analogy. Again, that of a dance.
If you can't dance then it is hard to grasp the concept. Just like riding a bike, it's hard to explain. And so, using this bike analogy, men of quantifiable wisdom explain the dynamics of it, the physics that make such ride possible. But they leave out the experience of such phenomenon: that you kind of lose yourself in the act and for a moment are one with the bike you're riding, the road you're facing. It's automatic, and it cannot be shared or explained, even when hazardous or tedious.
Life may be closer to a beat than it is to a void, and that simple adaptation can prove difficult to acquiesce. If it is a metaphor you're looking for, it's a simile. We may admire Galileo's genius but feel closer to Cervantes; it's not so much historians we look for but great storytellers. If you ask me, Yuval Harari's Sapiens resembles a lot García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. We may love photography, but it's painters we idolize. Even when it comes to books of scientific nature, we find them in the non-fiction aisle.
Perhaps there's another universe in which nothingness is everything. We may think of a way there when something's missing or in disarray, but perhaps it's only that otherness, the pulling force of a parallel funk, a dimension crawling in all fours like a mirage spiraling, buried deep within our most haunting desires. Others may see it as madness but in the eyes of the beholder beauty abides.
And likewise, that other duality, open and full of obscure possibilities, shines a torrential light in a shadowy cascade.
Those on the other side (because from here it seems that is out there but it could very well stem from an inner island, like a childhood dream echoing from afar, or be it something or someone other than anything at all) often find a tangible essence -perhaps a void that is way too much to bear. But it could all be a mind's trickery, perhaps our own.
We come from out of nothing, shot into existence like a bang, seemingly, and so the tangible perplexity of things everywhere is always at hand; we're surrounded by so much void; and, even when we think ourselves lacking, in reality, we have so much.
We're never complete, nonetheless... How could we not, since it's just a feeling or a state of mind.
Or, perhaps, it is that other netherworld of emptiness mirroring itself and collapsing into us in the elsewhere of thoughtlessness.
It seems farfetch but then again what do we really mean by anything? If it's all we seek, we come up empty handed. Our imaginary lack thereof is devoid of meaning. Is there, in the meaningless next door, a zero sum of nothingness that abruptly erupts when we feel so full, or spend a bit more than necessary or give a crap? Who knows if it's all just as absurd in that other realm, imagined of course, as there's no proof of any sort of thing, especially a "thing" that is not, something that we either haven't figured out or haven't thought of. Maybe when we feel the emptiness, it really is a signaling light at a crossroad, and finding ourselves in a three dimensional space we, or one "I", or zero "me" in and all... fail to see that other realm that's really causing us to think that something's amiss.
We walk as if we owned this body, this biomass of foreign entities comprised into a unit that makes us whole. But we're not yet there or anywhere.
And yet we say it is so. And if we’re asked who said it, we’d uttered our name, especially if asked who we are, but who are we to know what? We do not even know what we think not knowing and perhaps that’s more knowledge than necessity requires. We fear death but it’s fear we should kill at every turn. And yet, no one tells us that this very moment we live is also a way of dying. And that’s just a wasteful way of dying. Like whenever I raise a glass with my cousin Alan and proclaim outloud, “Tonight we die, motherfucker!”
We grow accustomed to the illusion of permanence, that we are more or less the same, perhaps only a bit older. The river too seems to be a single unit but if you look away, you’re never looking at the same sailor, the same ocean wave, the same reflection in the mirror. We’d like to live like amortals, for as long as we can. And yet we forgot who we were seven weeks ago today, or yesterday; we’re not sure who will it be that’ll claim our place in a little while from now. And what is it we mean when we say "now" since nothing stays steady and unmoved for a microscopic while, an eternity locked away in a nanosecond’s notice. Tomorrow is never here, and it is doubtful that "today" is all there really is. They often tell us Be here, Be present. Be in the moment. In the now.
But it is never present for long. It rarely remains the same encapsuled in the now, now, even as we face it presently, and in a moment all we’ve ever lived has irrevocably come to pass. So, we can only but to grasp a perennial sense of this moment, but it never is that and if so, it is ever so ephemeral, so minute, such a tiny unit in space, in time, that it almost seems comprised in a timeless knot, tied to nothing that ever was or will be. It only makes sense that things are being, cease to be and will continue being all at once. At once we are who we were and will continue to be so, forever being as we move forward and not being as we’re left behind. It’s just a nice thought to be in the present, though the more we remain attached to this moment, the more wholesome we are and the less fragmented we become.
Death’s then but an illusion since we never stop dying, otherwise we would stop living. You think you’d wake up tomorrow morning but it’ll be just now, even then an illusory state of mind, passing on to oblivion the very moment one tries to grasp it… life slips at the seams like a fistful of sand immersed in the ocean. Nothing’s present for long, not even for a fraction of a moment: every second we close our eyes, life blinks a thousandfold and in it the brisk embrace of yet another moment alive. It passes us by without anyone ever registering that it is us iterated in a cascade of endless passages. Death, too, is in the details, the drum of our heart in an encounter with a desirable outcome that rarely materializes. And so, it’s best to grasp whatever traces of sand are left behind, as if in them the seeds of everything that was ever possible still lingered on. We must take on this moment as if it were our last, not because it could be but because it is.
Along the way, we kept tabs with our collective being, we pick up here and there ideas of the one we were, share bits of the one we have been as we move forward; and, in order to continue being the one we’ll become the next moment, we make way for yet anew horizon. Rarely do we stop, and if you do, they’d tackle you, puzzled by your seemingly lack of direction. But it is necessary to stop every now and then, not in order to contemplate the next step or analyze the last one. Just in order to fully breathe in, hold your breath for a few secs and exhale ever so slowly. It is the speed with which we travel along, carrying our tiresome feet, stumbling on a reactive mind. The moment we contemplate it, our impulsivity comes to a standstill, the unending mystifying realms that await us. Boredom is nothing other than an impatient mind, and the solution rarely lies in finding the path to a new adventure, following the road that leads to the next distraction often misses the mark. That’s not to say that a change of pace wouldn’t serve us well; if one’s always playing the uptight, then a little bit of excitement might be serve us well. The problem is, too much of any given thing does not stimulate the mind. We’re creatures of novelty, so reinventing ourselves may be in order. Of course, we value the safety and comfort of the status quo, homeostasis is really what harmony strives after. But to be unable to stand still reflects a lack of stability, a looseness of character. Stillness of kind of the exercise the mind craves most. Master it and you shall reap the greatest reward. Cultivate inner peace, aim at centeredness. In quietude, you’ll see the wisdom of silence. It is intrinsically the meaning of well-being. It’s not well-doing or well-having.
Chasing after life because it bbn is short is the very thing that makes us grow old, since we’re told life’s short we want to get to the end so quickly, and find along the way old age in an ever increasing need for excitement. My boy wanted to kn ou what’s tranquility and an ancient voice inside me said, To be withstand the lack of excitement. And there it was, too, that a lot of quietude can deafen, so I wanted to rejoice there and then, borrow some of his untamed nature. Then he came to a standstill, and for a moment there we were in each other’s shoes. I find myself at a loss in a vast world without him and oftentimes I go through the world doing good to others, seeing him in every soul I come across.
Hope gets tiring, it has a shadow almost as long as that of hopelessness, and so the idea to make life bearable is not to hope too much and, at the same time, not to be hopeless. To continue see him every other day and grow feathers in between, to think that we're breathing the same air and to hold my breath. It is good to hurt because it reminds me how much I enjoy the one he is, always devoid of neediness though he needs me.
I pride myself eating slightly less than enough of the same food, but I am never hungry, and sleeping in the usual side of the bed keeps me up at night. We ought to come to a full standstill and realize we're nothing more than just a minuscule impulse, a fraction of a heartbeat, a moment that's now in the past never to be recovered even as you look back on it.
Death must be like a long-forgotten autumn afternoon in the bitter winter. A moment someone else remembers vividly but you've somehow missed because it did not ring truest. It must be like the expectations we had that never came to fruition and all those moments we could've lived if only we had the audacity and courage to take them on. It must be like a moment of weakness multiplied by a zero. How much death was claimed by shyness? How many kisses we stole from our mouths because we feared exposing our fragile ego? Yet we spared any thought on the mindless act of drinking in excess, hoping to lower our inhibitions.
Who knows if we really lived? Every moment alive life beckons at our doorstep, taunting, luring, poking us to see if the body still lives. Vitality demands movement, it compels us to act; it's no surprise that physical exertion (exercise, outdoor activities) and mental stimulation (lecture, bonding, wakefulness) render the best results for well-being.
(Notice: it's well-being, not well-doing or well-having.)
No one ever fully commits to live all the way in, but every now and then we must take a moment to do as we please, say what we want, dream boldly. It’d be catastrophic to adopt this frame of mind as a daily driver, homeostasis, status quo, autopilot; but that’s precisely our state of affairs. We live dangerously, unable to withstand the passage of time without conceiving the next big thing to come. We’re overloaded with information, bent on the next adventure, stuck on play mode without a pause, yearning for the distraction to come. Fun is not the endgame, yet ironically, most of us are overworked, either having too much of the cake or having a big peace of it but not eating any of it. May I point out the Buddhism’s Middle Path but a revised version of it. While the Buddha says here that balance is the way, it seems the Annointed One goes from one extreme to the other. (You may have observed the images of the Buddha in which he appears thinly brittle and frail with a stern resemblance facial expression and in others he looks overweight with a placid smile on his face; but you don’t find him anywhere in between those two). At one point, he starts off with all that life could offer: wealth, status, a loving family, a child on his way; and the next you see him abandoning all this comfort, off to find the reason why there’s so much suffering in the world. I know, weird. And what does he find after all this turmoil? He finally comes to the realization that life is suffering (dah) and that we can find some comfort in the midway, by not having neither too much or too little. He goes from extreme fasting (eating, according to legend, only a few grains of rice a day) to stuffing himself and ballooning to the most common depiction nowadays, a sitting obese duck, meditating under the shade of a tree. Shouldn’t the midway be about taking a little bit of responsibility as well, maybe go back to his wife and child after such a lifelong search of self discovery, maybe fast some days and not eat way too much?
Some of us, just the say, confuse the middle path (a.k.a., moderation) with a night out drinking after a long week of work; or maybe over drinking after being sober for a few days. The great Seneca, in his famous dissertation On The Shortness of Life (a literary masterpiece no sensible soul should ever go without reading several times throughout his/her life), makes the fateful assertion that it is okay to drink excessively once in a while. For someone who spared his life from a poisoned drink, emperor Nero's first attempt at murdering him, it seems like ill-conceived advise.
Temperance is not the same as abstinence; some people quit drinking altogether because they can't do so without making an ass of themselves or because they have alcoholism running thru their veins, and to those people is wise advise to stay the fuck away.
We should go days, even weeks without alcohol but socially engage in a few drinks when the occasion merits it: a lifelong friend resurfaces, a festivity or a vacation. Alcohol is like that friend some of us have had or been that would be inappropriate to bring home to a family reunion or a work event, but it is perfect when you want to just unwind and regress. It too depends on the character; some of us get tired of our own skin and desire to venture out, but in order to blend with those who find themselves at ease in the wilderness, we may have a sip of this neurotoxic elixir, go ape, belittle.
A little bit of quietude is always closer to the terrestrial paradise for my taste and more so if spent with a good author. And of those, there were so many moments. We dared live every now and then, and that made life worth living.
