Recreation Equations (Skipped and Solved)
Morning Thoughts #100
Scene: A sunny bench, evening time.
Light cuts through, reflecting past shapes. Formless and slowing the mind's connection factory. I am receiving something, but something less than direct information. Oh, sights with stalled interpretations! Let me feel them in this moment of inwardly forgotten expression.
Slowly living back the sedentary day. Not unhappy, not especially anxious, but a dull constriction, where life feeling could still possibly be. It's the end of a workday; this lack is natural - at least insofar as can be expected in this wholly unnatural modern environment.
Despite the constriction, a few thoughts sneak through: Our near-constant (and frantic!) media consumption produces a kind of psychic turbulence. Input after input, our jet streams are in flux, and crosswinds are potentially everywhere. New ones always popping up, unforecastable.
But here, looking out on a steady-flowing river, I have found a patch of smooth air. Undoubtedly, we live in an age of great mental turbulence. Maybe it's just a matter of being better pilots. Maybe it's just a matter of being pilots at all, no longer delegating the controls.
Maybe we employ fragmentation as a defense mechanism. With enough foresight to know we can expect no ultimate transcendence delivered through this or that worldly path, we live episodic lives to help us at least forget the futility of the long run. But the concept of futility itself is a product of the logic we are not willing to see through to the end. We haven't resigned ourselves to anything.
No, we are just here frolicking on the left side of a developing math equation until we jump clear over its calculation, landing ourselves on the playground of still another recreation equation. What does it all mean? Who has time for answers when there are so many questions?
And then all of a sudden, a young man has hopped off his bike, cast a line, and caught a fish among the lilypads directly in my view. Caught, truly hooked and caught, and then a moment later released and swimming off. And isn't that how our days are - they are all released in the end but only some really caught?