Category: Random Thoughts

  • Jet Lag

    Table for one in the slow lounge. The appeal of airports. It’s almost grounding. The hint of adventure. The burden of responsibility. The blessing of good fortune. The numerous memories of defining moments spent in airport terminals, restaurants, and departure and arrival halls. They’re all just whispers beckoning nostalgia while egging me on to want to take the next trip, preferably to a place I haven’t been before. 

    Life tends to stagnate when I revisit the same places all the time. Home is not always a good anchor, but then again, neither is being set adrift without a harbour in sight or in mind. The mind can never be unleashed or kept safe and protected. The biggest bigots I’ve seen are those that have rarely travelled. Being exposed to different cultures and places tends to erode that arrogance associated with myopic ignorance. 

    The irony of capitalism. Striving to serve a purpose greater than our selfish needs is always a good mediator to extract the good from the experiences and wealth of our lives. 

  • Perfectly Distracted 

    There was a time when I judged the character of others by the number of times they would use terms like existential, nihilism, fatalism, and the like. Often, the words of Einstein echoes in my head reminding me that if I can’t explain it simply enough, it’s because I don’t understand it well enough. And that’s how I viewed those pretentious ones that used large words to explain simple concepts of hope, struggle, or despair.

    One of my challenges in life has been my inability to articulate my thoughts in ways that made it relatable to others. From a young age I was recognised as the kid on a different wavelength. I was the one the bullies generally ignored because my response was unpredictable, while they picked on the ones that were somewhat ordinary, because ordinary, for all its merits, is predictable.

    Without any fanfare or deliberate effort, I found myself trying to polish my grasp of the English language so that my thoughts would tumble out of my mouth or keyboard with at least a vague similarity to what was going on in my head. The more coherent I sounded, the more confident I grew, and seemingly, the more I found that people were willing to interact with me. I guess people generally do avoid the unpredictable or misunderstood.

    The buoyancy I felt from these simple little milestones of inclusion pushed me to hone my skills further. My innate need to simplify a complicated life contributed to this by driving me towards reducing the effort needed to achieve simple outcomes. After all, why do in ten steps what can be done in two? It would be such a waste of energy to continue the ten step way.

    Equally so, I found myself growing more succinct, or as some would assume, terse in the way in which I expressed myself. To me, I was improving my skill for clear communication without being flowery or longwinded about it, but for everyone else, I was cocky and presumptuous because I apparently didn’t have the patience to work through things with them or explain myself properly. What I saw as saving them the monotony of a longwinded explanation, they saw as an arrogance on my part for assuming that they’re not worthy of such an explanation. Or worse, they assumed that I found joy in making them look stupid.

    And that’s how I’ve found efforts at effective communication can become defective communication. An innocent assumption on my part which suggested that others had a similar level of understanding or appreciation of the topic at hand, meant that I didn’t see my knowledge as superior. However, that was automatically misconstrued by others as me being arrogant and aloof. Of course, every assumption we make, correct or incorrect, is a reflection of how we view ourselves relative to what is going on around us, but that was hardly an effective point to make in such a situation. Although I did make it from time to time, depending on how keen I was to annoy the audience I was with.

    The point is, it’s easy to be distracted by our pursuit of perfection in any field that we’re passionate about, to the point where the purpose of the pursuit is forgotten, and all that remains is our sights on perfection. Most often, we seek to perfect in order to be more effective at achieving something, but along the way we become distracted by how our perfection is perceived and lose sight of what we set out to achieve in the first place.

    When that happens, perfectionism takes centre stage and purpose or meaning becomes a secondary consideration. I think it’s possible to achieve perfection relative to purpose, although true perfection is unattainable. There is merit and virtue in pursuing perfection, but both are undermined when the purpose or value of such efforts are discarded in favour of being perceived as perfect in that regard. Our efforts, if left unchecked, will result in us allowing our proficiency of practice at what we’re pursuing to define us, rather than remembering that our proficiency was intended to enable us to define something else in a more valuable way.

    Life is lost in moments of distraction, but we grow distracted in moments of pursuing a better life. Being surrounded by a social standard grounded in escapism doesn’t help either. And labeling people that use big words without appreciating why they choose to communicate the way they do reflects a superficiality and insecurity on our part, more than it does on theirs.

  • A Brain Dump

    Brain dumps are therapeutic, if you do it right. It allows a release, an unstructured release of the clouds that trail you through the day. Life demands structure, and structure demands discipline. Both have their place, but did you notice how beautifully random the structure of nature appears? It has probably the most complex system of checks and balances we’ll ever encounter, yet it thrives if appreciated, especially where such appreciation simply demands that it be left to find its own way.

    People can’t function like that. If left to find our own way, most are inclined to believe that no one cares. Hardly anyone recognises the freedom in that. I find myself caught in a health cycle that is unfamiliar to me. Having had an acute focus for many years now on the physiological impact that our emotions and thought patterns have on us, I lost sight of what keeps us above ground when it comes to navigating through that space. It’s so easy to get pulled into the quicksand that we’re always warning others about.

    Recurrent failures at building relationships that are not optional can create gaps in your soul that you don’t notice until the possibility of filling those gaps erodes almost completely. The decision on which relationships are optional and which are not is a simple one that is tied to our value systems. My need for authenticity will not allow me to be selective as to when I accept and embrace my responsibilities towards others, or when I set it aside for convenience’s sake. I am perfectly capable of abandoning or morphing my value system into one that is more convenient, but I know that the moment I do that, I will lose any legitimate claim to cry foul when others do the same.

    Optional relationships are the ones that hold no yoke over us if we neglect it. If there is no tie of kinship or contract, we are not under any obligation to care for or contribute to such relationships. Communal obligation, that is. Strange though that it seems like optional relationships tend to get the most investment these days. It seems as if these they provide us with needed distractions from the relationships grounded in responsibility and compulsion. There seems to be a demand for attention or reciprocation at every turn, mostly out of obligation rather than passion or purpose.

    It seems I’ve even forgotten how to do a brain dump. My health has been less than satisfactory recently, and almost all of it has been associated with a collage of duress that has coloured my life for a long time now. Each tile in the collage stems from an investment I made in others, some in a personal setting while others in a professional setting. Watching trust replaced by loyalty to the prevailing authority is commonplace these days. I’ve had to remind myself often in recent months that more should not be expected from the ones that worship titles and pursue labels and acronyms. But it’s the contagion of human nature. The moment we see beyond the superficial gusto that people present as their armour of confidence, it’s difficult not to sympathise with the child within.

    Too many times have I witnessed people reaching an old age while still not yet having achieved the state of being a fully formed adult. The difficulty lies in the rarity of adults. Most are overgrown children waiting for some childhood need to come to pass, while grudgingly accepting the responsibility that accumulates with the years. All the while, the essence of our lives are spent in waiting for others to do right by us. It rarely happens.

    Those that have crumbling spines suffer from a deficiency of bone density because they lack the courage to build what only they can build. The more we tell our bodies that we’re not good enough, the less our bodies will respond favourably when we need it to. If it is true that the soul is the seat of intelligence and the body merely a vessel for expression, then it stands to reason that we have the power to enable our bodies for good, or to turn it on itself in order to express the weakness we harbour within.

    I’ve been waiting with warranted hope that some relationships would have finally blossomed into the beauty that it once promised, but I forgot along the way that I was not the defining influence in those relationships. What contaminated it from without, I assumed to be a deficiency within the relationship, when in fact the only deficiency was that I held others to a standard that they did not subscribe to for themselves.

    The contention built up within me, slowly sapping my clarity of thought, then my energy, then my creative expression, gnawing away at my memory, and finally imposing the weight of its imbalance on my body which eventually caved in under all the pressure. It sounds like a dramatic description of the flu, but the reality is that it takes a chorus of failed expectations to wear me down, never just a single one.

    Those that succumb to a single betrayal have invested too much in a single part of their life. Worse than just the investment, they divested from their own lives. They assumed that entrusting another with more than their affection, in fact with everything they needed to breathe seemed like the ultimate expression of commitment to an outcome desired by both, but invested in by only one.

    Ill health is a sign of imbalance in the way we live our lives. Disease stands a greater chance of invading our bodies when our immune systems are focused on fighting the disruption we’ve created within. When we live under duress, we become easy pickings for our enemies. Be they disease or spineless creatures, the net effect is the same. We succumb to circumstances that would otherwise be opportunities for growth. The answer is so simple, yet so elusive.

  • Dystopia

    In those moments when purpose is blurred and distractions appeal, life passes by almost unnoticed. It feels like the hamster in the wheel, spinning away and amused at how fast it can go, then looking over and seeing everything that still needs to get done, stepping off for a few brief moments, and suddenly starts wondering what would make the wheel turn faster.

    The wheel that turns is not the wheel that moves us forward. It’s usually the wheel that runs us down and provides some relief from the illusion of stagnation. Or is it the illusion of progress. Ground hog day holds much truth in it, and I’ve often thought of life as being ground hog day. I see myself waking up each morning trying to do things better than I did it the day before. As the days accumulate so too does the list of things I try to do better. Each time I try something that feels new, it turns out to be mostly a combination of many things old. But the new experiences and feelings that accompany the effort provides the needed distraction to keep me interested.

    Trade in that wheel for a tail, or maybe a car, and suddenly I find myself chasing my tail while spinning that wheel in a more luxurious setting. Of course none of this makes any sense because if it did, it wouldn’t be dystopia, would it? Utopia doesn’t exist. We know this to be true, so it stands to reason that dystopia is reality, is it not? According to our friend Google, dystopia is an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. Let’s consider that to be true for a moment and see what it implies for our sanity.

    Everything is as bad or as good as we perceive it to be. We choose to either see the good in it, or we choose to see the bad. Those choices are informed by our experiences and how those experiences made us feel. The more inclined we are to believe that we are able to influence the outcomes, the more likely it is that we will perceive those things as good, and vice versa. But at the core of all this still lies the fact that what is, is, and what we see is what we impose of our perspectives on what is. Make sense yet?

    Let’s consider it slightly differently. We tend to view life in a polarised manner, almost binary in nature. Things are either good or bad. Nothing is ever neutral. More accurately, we never feel truly neutral about something because if prompted to choose between good or bad, we will choose either one. I don’t know of anyone that absolutely fights for their right to be neutral, nor am I certain that that is even possible.

    So back to our perceptions and how we impose that on the situation at hand. If someone argues that the world is turning into a hell hole, someone else could easily argue that there is hope, while another could argue that it’s in fact already a hell hole, while a fourth could argue that it was a hell hole at some point in history and that we’re already improving it as we progress. Every single one of these perspectives could be successfully defended, but by definition, not all could be correct. Unless we consider each within their own context,  in which case each will be equally true.

    So what’s the point? I think it has something to do with who decides what is good or what is bad. Then we look at who has the majority vote, and that prevails as the accepted standard. Anyone that opposes the standard is considered bad even if their perspective is inherently good, but that good cannot be measured as good because the standard against which it is being measured is bad, but is deemed to be good. And so it goes until eventually we realise that dystopia or utopia are simply makings of our own minds. The blue pill, or the red one? It doesn’t matter, does it?

    I don’t think it does. I think that the context that we choose for our perspectives will always define our reality. That reality will never be the true reality, because true reality can only ever be gauged independent of subjective observations, which means that any social standard or system of governance is based on the oppression of the minority and the celebration of normalcy. Therefore, even in upholding justice in such a system, given that justice would be defined against the social standards that have been adopted by the majority, then such justice could very well be injustice, but will not be recognised as such because the accepted authority has defined it to be good.

    This transcends even divine laws within the context of this lifetime because our judgement against the divine laws will only take place in a reality completely detached from this one. That day of reckoning will be independent of our influence, and therefore will be immune to our perceptions. It will simply be.

    Of course not everyone believes in the day of reckoning beyond this lifetime, in which case, if the above argument holds true, it’s all an entire waste of time, and a massive oppression on all involved the moment we try to establish any social order or code of morality or any standard for that matter. Individual freedoms are automatically eroded, and in fact suppressed, the moment we choose order over free expression. Defining any constraints becomes an injustice, and the hope of any true remuneration for our toils and struggles is completely null and void, unless we’re left to act with impunity. But even that won’t work, because the moment we are left to act with impunity, we automatically impose our expression on others, in which case we suppress their expression, assuming we’re the more dominant, or else ours will be suppressed if we’re not the more dominant. Either way, justice in averted and balance, true balance is impossible.

    Dystopia. In the absence of a higher order that we collectively serve, dystopia is all that is possible. But to each their own. Welcome. Don’t make yourself comfortable. This doesn’t last very long even if you insist on inaction, because entropy is your best friend, time is a superficial construct, and balance is based entirely on a combination of perception and subscription by the collective, which inherently cannot be trusted for consistency. I guess that’s a sneak peek into the dystopia of my mind. It’s an exhausting place to be.

  • In a World of Worries

    I often wonder why it seems so difficult to write about the good of the day, as opposed to how easy it is to rant about the bad. Sitting in my corner of the cave, with a window facing the gurgling water from the pond just outside, I’m often focused on the mental fatigue that draws me to that corner while hardly noticing the calming effect of that water and the usual cool breeze that accompanies it.

    The moments taken to calm the soul are often forgotten in our distraction from the beauty that calms it. I wonder if the ability to notice the blessing that lifts the burden, rather than sighing at the lifting of the burden reflects the balance with which we meet the day? Are we so focused on what bears down on us that we’ve stopped noticing what makes the struggle worth struggling?

    Just trying to shift the focus in writing this post demands more presence of mind than usual. It’s easier to bleed at the keyboard than it is to spill beautiful petals of hope and resilience without the scorn or the rhetoric that accompanies a cynic’s tale no matter how often betrayed. So easily I find myself drawn into the darkness that offers some quiet. The absence of light is not always daunting if the darkness provides reprieve from the demands of the world.

    Every curious detail observed in the light by one driven to act demands attention, while every response holds within it the promise of joy or fulfilment. That joy or fulfilment is almost always incomplete if its essence is appreciated by too few. If the purpose of life is to serve a greater good, then what becomes of the fulfilment of that purpose when the greater good rejects such servitude?

    Cryptic thoughts are as exhausting as its interpretation. Speaking plainly is an art lost to me while being deliberately vaguely cryptic comes naturally in a world where such sincerity is most often misconstrued as an attack on the ego, rather than appreciated at the value of the beautiful face that it offers.

    I’ve seen too often how a good gesture is deliberately distorted so that the recipient is relieved of any compulsion to reciprocate. Those we wish to indulge, or we hope would indulge us, are the ones with whom even bad gestures we’d aim to distort into good ones. Seeing good in the ones we court is easy. It doesn’t require an investment in anything other than what we wish to receive, except where what we wish to gain is fulfilled within, and does not require validation from without. Achieving a state of composure in the face of ingratitude is the greatest gift in a world of worries. It saves us from feeling enslaved by the affirmations of others, while liberating us to enjoy the cryptic details that eludes most everyone else.

    Just last week I quoted Einstein to someone. If we can’t explain it simply enough, then we don’t understand it well enough. Perhaps this is telling of my grasp of this world. My struggle to articulate my thoughts reflects the challenges I face in trying to understand the multitudes of why, but comfort is offered when I consider that most shy away from the challenge even before reaching this point.

    The inclination to pacify myself relative to the lacking conviction of others threatens to prompt me into a similar space of complacency as those I despise. Perhaps I despise them so much because I am acutely aware of how even now, with this deliberate attempt to express the beauty of the world around me, I find myself consistently drawn towards emphasising everything that’s wrong with it.

    I walked on the lawn with bare feet the other day. For a moment my senses were teased and I felt grounded. I gazed around the garden and looked past the sprouting indigenous trees, and instead noticed the chores left unfinished, or new ones that begged for my attention. I walked on and paid little attention to them because the lawn felt so good beneath my feet. In that moment I knew that even the reality of this world and all its worries could not rob me of the fascination of that moment. But no sooner had that thought occurred that I found myself robbing myself of that which the world was unable to take from me.

    I know there’s an important point in all this rambling. Perhaps just that knowledge will make this worth sharing, even if the clarity of that point continues to elude me. Everything has an opposing truth, so perhaps this world of worries is simply the wrong side of the coin that too many are distracted by. If the first step towards success lies in acknowledgement, then perhaps this is the glimmer of hope that the realisation of the other side of this coin is the beginning of turning it over.

    [There appears to be no comfortable nor logical point at which I feel ready to end this post, so perhaps it is best left unfinished…for now]

  • The Silent Statement

    My thoughts are often as complicated to grasp as my writing is to read. I sometimes read through some of my older posts and wonder how anyone could have gotten the point when I struggle to follow the thought process myself. I used to relate it all much more simplistically in the past. It was relatable, not just to me, but to others that it resonated with. It’s not so easy to relate anymore. I find myself slowly receding into silence again. It’s like I’ve come full circle without having completed the journey. The contradiction glares at me while I try to make sense of it all.

    Silence often says more than any vocal statement we make. It’s the language of both lies and compassion. For me, it’s the language of understanding. When I’m inclined to believe that my perspective will most likely be misunderstood or unappreciated, I tend towards silence. It’s my restraint and my statement. It restrains me from verbalising much that will be found offensive, often because of the harsh truth it contains given my poor bedside manner, and it’s my statement because I choose not to engage about something that I believe will not have a meaningful outcome. That’s how I use silence to make my statement.

    Unfortunately there are too many that use it for very different reasons, the most common of which is to avoid being perceived unfavourably. In those moments when the truth is needed for closure, to understand the reasons for betrayal, or to know why the good we put forward was reciprocated with dishonesty or insincerity, silence cuts sharper and deeper than any harsh truths that could have been offered. In those moments the silent one tries desperately to hide their shame while maintaining a facade of arrogance or feigned hurt. Silence, in moments like those, is employed for no reason but to save the betrayer from having to share the truth of their betrayal.

    I think it gets worse when we hold the key to justice but deny the rights of the victims when we choose not to get involved because of the potential repercussions for us. At times when world powers abstain from voting or acting against rogue nations or human scum in order to retain political alliances, their silence does to the victims of those oppressors what the silence of a lover does to their no-longer-beloved. The impact is the same, it’s only the scale that differs.

    Every betrayal destroys a soul, and every soul holds within it an entire world. Each betrayal forces a reinvention of that soul, and each reinvention creates a more brittle soul. Brittle is not necessarily weak. It simply becomes more unpredictable as it gets closer to its limit. Fortunately for most, that limit is significantly more than most because of the reinventions. But when it is reached, the brittle snap that ensues leaves a wake of destruction that can rarely be understood.

    But there’s a more important point I wanted to make about how we use silence for selfish purposes. Perhaps my use of silence is not as noble as I’d like to believe it is. Perhaps just writing this post will provide insights that will disarm me at important moments when others will correctly interpret my silence and take the offence I was hoping to spare them instead. Perhaps there will be none of that because as we’ve seen so often, a shared sin is often overlooked because the collective guilt pacifies our conscience anyway.

    I think we all use silence in this way. I think the silence we maintain at times when we should be outspoken or brutally honest reflects our priorities in that moment. If speaking out will result in an increase of clutter or responsibility beyond what we currently wish to bear, then silence becomes the obvious choice.

    Another incomplete thought process. I know there is a truth in there somewhere…but like life, the essence of it eludes me.

  • Writer’s Block

    I recently advised someone that when faced with writer’s block, the best remedy is to write about it. Seems counter-intuitive, but it seems to work for me. My problem though is that I don’t recognise myself as a writer. I vent through words, often carefully selected to maintain the level of neutrality needed in my sentiments so as not to offend many close associates that I was bold enough to invite into this blog space. That, and the fact that I would not want this space to be turned into a sensationalist’s whoring for attention. I think it works beneficially for me because it forces me to focus on the issues at hand, rather than taking an easy swipe at soft targets.

    Soft targets, on the other hand, make for an easy solution to writer’s block, if I were a writer, that is. The problem I have with subscribing to that label is that it assumes that I have writing worth sharing, or more importantly, that I do justice to the part. I ramble. A lot. That rambling is often my attempt to make sense of the internal conversations I’m having, while my focus is to articulate it in a way that will make sense to someone witnessing my cycle of insanity, if they were privy to it. So I write the way I think, often without filters, with the exception of the scenario described in the opening paragraph. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen. But again, it only remains to be seen if it was written for the audience and not primarily for my own sanity.

    Thoughts that have threatened to prompt me to write in recent weeks appear to consistently centre around the acquisition of knowledge. I’m caught between the need versus the want of knowing something. I know that one is driven by the ego and the other by sincere curiosity, but the words are so easily interchangeable that it’s difficult to make a definitive observation about it. What I am convinced of though, is the fact that there are times when we demand to know something simply because we feel entitled to the information, or because we wish to use it for ulterior motives. The lesser frequent motivation for acquiring knowledge is because we are genuinely curious and seek to understand, rather than judge. While both have their place, I think there is a significant imbalance leaning towards the former. Given the state we find the world in today, it’s not surprising that most knowledge is acquired for egotistical purposes before anything else.

    Perhaps in that is some hint at what would cause the writer’s among us to block. Perhaps writer’s block is what happens to all of us in different ways, whether we’re writers or not. I think that when we lose sight of purpose, we struggle to find reason. In the absence of reason or purpose, we’re most likely to act in response to an expectation rather than to act towards fulfilling a greater purpose. If we’re fortunate, we realise it soon enough and refocus our efforts which clears the mental block that stifled our progress. If we don’t realise it soon enough, chances are that our ego will succeed in clouding our judgement further, and in our efforts to allay our fears of insignificance or incompetence, we play to the audience and slowly erode any sense of purpose we had in what we set out to do simply because we cannot afford to be seen as lacking.

    The fact that we may be travelling the same path that we set out on does not necessarily mean that we still take joy or benefit from travelling it. I think there’s an important point in there somewhere. I also just realised that writing about my mental block spawned thoughts that were hardly at the forefront of my mind when I started. I guess the trick is to be able to express without judging yourself first, or without considering if what is to be expressed will be seen as wisdom, or whimsical. I generally don’t care much for the opinions of others, although recently I have been distracted by it from time to time. When that distraction reared its head, I found myself floundering in my ability to be decisive which is a very frustrating place to be.

    Re-centering my thought process on what I subscribe to has made the difference between bobbing around aimlessly in the sea of dysfunction around me and setting the current to disrupt that same sea. Disruption is often frowned upon, but usually only by those that lack purpose. Disruption in thought and deed is needed to avoid slipping into a rut of routine while believing we’re part of something great. That something great is usually the energy of the masses that are in that rut with us, while the volume of our collective trudging quickly turns that rut into a trench. The distracted masses then look around and celebrate their time in the trenches as a select few rise to the top and exit the trenches because they became the champions of the dysfunction purely through tenure rather than contribution. It’s the age-old celebration of a struggle. The duration of our struggles is often what defines us, more than our emergence from the same state. It’s the shortest path to pacification of the meek.

    The cynic in me is thriving, which is usually a sign that I need to abate and reflect. Introspection is a good place to be. It’s a pity that it is so often disrupted by a need to act on its fruit, where the absence of such action will leave us being as impotent as the foam on the ocean. Writer’s block be gone.

  • Peace

    Belying my exterior,
    That serene scene saunters into view of my mind’s eye.
    Driving to a destination that isn’t,
    Until my fuel is spent,
    Effortlessly emerge from the vehicle,
    And continue on foot,
    Until I am spent.
    Finally melding into the sand,
    Without a trace,
    I become one with time.
    Passing you by,
    Unnoticed.
    Finally at peace.