philosophical

Mindfulness

It’s a hard sell. Mind minus body. The lumbering meaty thing is still there, with all its joints and hemoglobin and heart conditions. It doesn’t leave you just because you decide to value that tangled web of firing neurons and chemical imbalances called a brain.

You do value it. Of course you do. It’s what makes your body tick, it’s what allows you to run on the treadmill and eat falafel from a food truck at 3am with your date,

No, that’s not right. That’s your brain.

Is your brain the same thing as your mind?

It’s that kind of night. The kind where you’re asking stupid philosophical questions and waving a white flag of defeat in front of your responsibilities. You’re done. You’re through. No more tonight. You need a rest.

So how do you convince people to see your mind over your body? It’s hovering there, your mind, above and around and in between all of your bodily functions and orifices and fortunate features. But it doesn’t overlay them. It just sort of shimmers. Sometimes it gets noticed. But not usually.

No, when you walk down the street to the post office to send the birthday present you’ve owed your mother for three months now and the rent check you’ve owed for slightly longer, you are not a mind above a body. You are a theoretical person, with a theoretical mind, but mostly you are simply a collection of limbs and features that are recognized as human.

Are you?

Is anyone?

It really is that kind of night. Shut your mind off. Let your brain wander. Watch some TV. Stop thinking about that girl you saw on the train and wanted to talk to. She’s long gone. She doesn’t exist in your world anymore.

Does she exist at all then?

Does it matter?

Shut up.

Advertisement

Yearning

Sometimes I feel a yearning for something, but I don’t know what. I can’t recognize what it is that I’m looking for, what it is that I’m craving.
It’s an odd feeling, wanting something, needing something so badly but not being able to reach what it is. There’s a nostalgic element to it, as well
as a melancholy one. It’s as if, all at once, I’m waiting for something that is to be while mourning it’s eventual loss as well and missing what
once was. How do you reconcile such confusing emotions?
There isn’t a real reason for my writing about this tonight. I simply feel, once in a while, that I need to write what I’m thinking and feeling.
Sometimes it even helps, makes the next day or the nest few hours a little easier, just a little freer from worries and strange emotions.
Tonight as I write, the weather has finally turned cold and outside lightning flashes and thunder rumbles occasionally. I’m not scared of the lights and
noises anymore, not like when I was young, but I still feel an uneasiness climbing into bed with a storm raging outside. The mere fact that the sky
can release such vast quantities of water upon us seems to make all my worried insignificant and petty. Perhaps they are – probably so, in fact.
Nevertheless, there’s something comforting about looking at them on the screen, written out and confessed. There’s a release to it.