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Brief, Dim Flashes

I want autonomy but I'm not inclined to do very much with it.  If I had perfect freedom to design my life I would design it so that it was small and quiet and so that I would need only to sit still and think in order to enjoy it.  I don't need to be in a stream of new stimuli.  I just want to look at things.  The world is a gallery I am obliged to pass through on my way to nothingness.  

But there is pressure to seek excitement.  Or to live more, to engage, lest life pass one by.  I am perfectly happy to let life pass me by and I don't see why such would be a bad thing.  I don't collect experiences, perhaps because the emotions that are associated with experiences are for me very limited.  I am in general happier when I am not part of things.  

Emotions aren't attractive to me.  I don't seek them any more avidly than I seek brief flashes of dim light.  This is not to say that I don't want to feel happy.  I do.  But if in any given situation I can't achieve happiness for whatever reason then that is OK.  

It occurs to me that all experiences are the same.  Something happens, something is the outcome, and we have some emotion. The only difference is that we attach value to all of this.  We say that it is better to experience happiness than sadness, better to succeed than to fail, better than to get than to be denied what we want.  I am in my own life exhausted by these evaluations, in part because of the illusion of their necessity.  I would prefer that experience be pure - that is, without value: good or bad.  Perhaps it's possible to enjoy every experience for its affirmation that we are alive to have it.  Or perhaps it doesn't matter whether we enjoy such or not.  I don't know.  I don't need to know.  I'm just looking.

But if there is something that I know it is that I am not interested in spending time assessing the fullness of my life, or the value of the content of my experiences, or in being vibrant and attractive.  I don't want to try to impress society's many gatekeepers, to decide what I deserve, or to make anything of myself.  I just want to observe and move on.  Being a nonparticipant involves of course living at a remove on many subtle levels, and in my youth the idea of embracing alienation was terrifiying.  But that changed because I was forced to embrace it anyway and I came to understand the beauty and freedom of isolation quickly.  I am ready now to appreciate solitude and to be myself a brief, dim flash.

Comments

  1. UnknownMarch 11, 2019 at 11:15 AM

    Do what feels right to you my friend, some of my happiest moments have been made without even opening the gate of my yard.

    ReplyDelete

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