I don’t know why I feel empty today. Today was a good “stressful” day for me. Met Aurora without any plans. That will be a story for some other day, some other time and mood. It was a good feeling to meet her! PERIOD!
Getting tangled within this ghostly world, I don’t know how I phase out. I have tried controlling my “phasing out” thing but nothing has worked so far. Callisthenics seems to do fine with my physical health. Walking has become a type of philosophy for me — a way of life I guess. But sometimes I just feel so empty, even when people are around. Although I went on a date, still I feel so much caught up in my own bizarre mind cave. I don’t know why. Maybe I am a stoic? But I feel mentally oscillating here and there. Mostly to the unknowns of life itself.
As my hush descended the sky-bridge towards Ratnapark, there was this gathering of people around. They were listening to this “blind” middle-aged person. He was differently able. He was singing and his voice, I felt, was full of pain. I don’t know. Normally, I am so lost in my own world, I barely notice anything around. But today was different. I heard the man singing this song — a symbol of love I suppose. It was like falling suddenly from the bed, waking up in the middle of a dream which you might forget eventually if not given enough care otherwise. In that very moment, I felt so strange; this uncanny feeling I had when I saw people around listening to him. I felt satisfied. Not that I am a sadist. But I kind of fell off to have a smooth landing. I never knew how he was enjoying his singing. Maybe it was just an abstraction. But it was something.
See! Often times I feel I am lost in my own world so much so that I often fail to notice little things that matter. Little significance of life — they are something. We think we know ourselves so much that we fail to understand the outer world. I don’t know. At least, when I am empty I have these crises which I take as optimistic nihilism. Optimism and Nihilism might not be something that might go together hand in hand. But they do. I am not an optimist. I consider myself a pessimist, partly because that’s how I was brought up in my life, in the family who has learnt to embrace struggle as some meaning of existence. Life is meaningless I know. At least my life so far hasn’t been full of “great” milestone that I can brag about. But that shouldn’t disappoint me to actually live my life. I have to explore. We all have to explore just to get in this experience of life; something we might remember in our last hours of existence. Till then, we just have to keep hanging on to this wire like the sword of Damocles ready to stab you whenever you pull the string. But still! Life finds a way as they say.
But I haven’t still. So, I have learnt to embrace this meaninglessness, insignificance of life as a way to do whatever shit I can do to fire up the neurons in my brain. Most of the time I am empty. I don’t know why. Maybe that’s just me, the abstraction of me. A lump of particles trying to form the abstract me. Your thoughts of me. Your memories of my existence. Do you think that’s real? Or something else that has been programmed in a stimulation? That might be one of the infinite realities there can ever be. But what matters is how you are doing things in life. Are you able to recognize what the world around you is doing? Can you grasp the external agents like some kind of anti-protagonist in a movie? Or perhaps you feel like an NPC from a video game. That’s how my life is. How yours is. And how you and I are tangled in this superposition of thought processes trying to understand a part of reality. Maybe reality is subject. Maybe it’s objective. You never know. But you know what? You are just an organ trying to understand yourself and the outer world.
A quadrtic Koch curve generated using my library panim[1]
So, you are a very strange loop[2]. You think you are some particles coming together in a reality, evoking memories, moments, experiences, thought processes. The creative imagination you think you have, they are just synapses. Your ‘self’ conforms and reinforces its own realness. To understand “self”, you must first understand the “self”. At this point, I guess I have failed miserably on explaining the concept of you. Maybe you know better about yourself than me. But you are strange. We, you and me, are built to perceive ‘big stuff’ rather than ‘small stuff’, even though the domain of the tiny seems to be where the actual motors driving the reality reside. Imagine small cells and particles acting underneath yourself independently, unknown of the greater vastness. The vastness which is you. Imagine what you are doing right now, and the series of thoughts and actions that brought you right here. The chaos persists. You persist. At one side, “You” are an expression. ‘I’ - an expression denoting a set of very high abstractions — a life story, a set of tastes, a bundle of hopes and fears. On the other side, ‘I’ is an expression denoting a physical object made of trillions of cells, each of which is doing its own thing without the slightest regard for the supposed ‘whole’ of which it is but an infinitesimal part.
You are like a mirror mirroring a mirror. The loop continues indefinitely. But your existence is shallow. As shallow as what this article can talk about. You think you know much. You think you are capable of doing things by yourself. You think you are holding on to things that matter. But that might just be a pre-disposed notion of you. And that’s alright. Just embrace the crisis in you, all the unimaginative things you fantasize, all the elusive concepts you get hold of.
You are really really strange. You are a strange loop. You are an idea in this article. You are an entity in my mind. You are superimposed with me. And I am with you. I am an abstraction in your mind.