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I Am An Edifice

I don't seek or collect experiences.  My life isn't episodic.  I'm not living a story.  I'm an edifice.  I stand in the elements and am affected and continue standing.  It's not an effort of will.  I am just a wall.

This is in contrast to how I imagine others live.  How they consider their experiences, how they think about the content and character of the things that happen to them.  How they describe the arcs of their lives.  But maybe I'm wrong about that. I can only guess what other people's lives are like.

I have no arc.  Or I am unconcerned with mine if I do have one.  Experiences flash and then dissipate.  I'm not interested in their memories.  Or in my life's posterity.  I let experiences happen and I do nothing most of the time.  Processing is no task since I am as well off if I decide not to do so as I might be otherwise .  Does this make sense?  I fear that it doesn't.

If it doesn't it's because I don't know how to compare what my life is like to what someone else's life is like.  I don't think about what my life is like in that way.  But I see a difference.  It seems that other people conduct their lives differently and that they process their experiences differently.  But I don't know how to explain what's different.  This is the best illustration I've devised: my experience of self is smooth and airy while those of others are weighty and convoluted.  Theirs are rich whilw mine's impoverished, but I'm ok with that.  I'm generally not plagued by concerns like small importance, semiotic significance, spiritual meaning, or emotional weight.  I'm not caught in the web of trying to be part of things.  I am not active.  I am reactive.

I'm just something that sticks up from the ground.  You might lean on me.  If I'm reliable it's incidental.  I keep my complexity to myself because it's not for anyone else.  My life isn't for anyone but me.  It isn't vivid and passionate.  I'm not desperately alive, living for new stimuli.  I am instead mostly instimulable.  A rock.  An island.  Happily unimportant in my own story.

If others want stimulation, I am not like them.  If they need to have experiences, then I'm different.  If they are active in moving the plots of their lives forward, then I'm set apart.  But I don't know people. I don't have any idea how others exist in the world.  I can only say for myself that I am small and quiet and I live a vaporous life that I am happy with.  I am not complex and other people seem to be.  I don't know what this opinion amounts to.  I will summate now:  it seems to me that other people are far more invested in the nature of their own experiences than I am, that they clutch for significance therein while I see none, and this makes me feel confused.  In general, I am confused about people.

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