We play the hand we’re dealt. It’s all we can do. The cards remain the same, although we may swap some for others at times. But even so, it’s not really the value of the cards that matters. It’s not a game where you win or lose. It’s all in the perspective, in the way you look at the cards in your hand.
That’s my bit of philosophical BS, coming at around midnight my time, after an evening of fun as well as some serious conversation.
How do people fall in love?
How do human beings form out of little gobs of nothing inside a womb?
How do musicians make music?
How do composers think up entirely new music?
How do writers think up the right words for the story?
How do people retain hope when things go badly?
How do people lose themselves so completely?
How did Nestle Tolehouse come up with the perfect cookie recipe?
How do you even decide when something is perfect?
How do migraines get cured?
How did human beings learn to think?
…
Sometimes when I think about the amount of things I don’t know, I feel overwhelmed. But then I relax, when I realize that I’m in the majority, and that anyway, sometimes the answers don’t matter – just thinking up the questions can be enough.
Everything can change, between one moment and the next. Anything can cause the change, as long as it triggers something within your mind. It can be a snatch of song, floating from a car window that reminds you of an event from the past. It can be the way a leaf falls from a tree, looking just like a similar one that you saw a week before. It can be just a few words of a conversation that two people walking by your are having.
Everything can change, between one moment and the next. The sky, that looked so blue and wonderful can turn into a scorching, painful color. The breeze, that felt so pleasant and cool and sweet, can now make your hands feel like ice. Your very insides, which felt so balanced and serene, can turn into a flurry of angry bees, buzzing and stinging and making your muscles clench.
Everything can change, between one moment and the next. It’s impossible to shut out those day-to-day coincidences that meet our eyes and ears and remind us of things. So, we accept the fact that everything can change. We accept the fact that our emotions are irrational, strange things. We accept, and we live with it.
Everything can change between one moment and the next. Sometimes, things change for the worse. But when things change for the better, in the space of a breath, it feels like a gift.
The Servant walked through the halls and knew himself to be invisible. Every effort he made to please went unnoticed and unremarked upon. Every action he took was taken for granted, never acknowledged. Every breath that he took seemed to be silent and he so rarely used his voice that he almost forgot what it sounded like. He must be invisible then, perhaps not even substantial enough to be considered a living human being.
And yet his hands felt substantial enough when he lifted the dinner things off the table. The muscles in his arms hurt when he took the heavy coal box from one room to the next in the winter. His legs ached and his feet blistered as he trudged through the snow to get the carriage or the horses or the ponies for the girls in the winter. In every physical aspect he felt real and alive – so he cherished his work and bore it, day after day, because he felt through it what it was like to be a person.
On the other hand, he very much doubted that the Master or the Mistress or the little girls often felt such aches and pains as him and they considered themselves to be extremely alive – more alive than him for certain. Perhaps, if so, the pain he bore wasn’t a sign of being a person? Perhaps it meant something else – that he was like an animal, bred only to do the work for others. Of course, unlike animals, he received a sum of money for his constant drudgery.
Every time he remember the fact that he earned wages, The Servant felt slightly better. It was then that he would think of his free day once every two weeks; it was then that he would remember what it was like to whirl a pretty girl around the dance floor at the best tavern in town; it was then that he would remember that he knew how to laugh and that he could make others laugh too. So long as he was stuck in the house with Master and Mistress and the little girls, though, he felt he was invisible, a ghost that came to life only once in two weeks but was dead as can be the rest of his days.
In the silence of the night, the spirits emerged.
Some of the spirits were elderly men and women, and they simply sat upon their graves, unmoving. They’d had a lifetime of movement and felt they’d earned their eternal rest. Others, the younger spirits mostly, frisked about, dancing and playing with the shadows and with each other. Ghostly mothers held onto equally ghostly babies, and ghostly fathers held the hands of young and ghostly children. Some families reunited, as they did every night, at one of the picnic tables in a far corner or between the trees amidst the graves. Some old lovers replayed their quarrels and affairs, frowning and smiling accordingly.
All in perfect silence. Someone walking outside the graveyard wall wouldn’t have heard a thing besides the rustle of the leaves in the wind or the scurry of a squirrel across the grass. If someone were to look over the wall, however, things would have been different.
It was very fortunate, the spirits of the graveyard agreed again and again, that there was a wall built around this particular graveyard. It was much too high for anyone to be able to peer in, and it had no easy footholds for a determined climber to take advantage of. The few who had managed to look over – by bringing a ladder, or by standing on someone’s shoulders, say – had been in such shock that they’d either never spoken of what they’d seen or had been carted off to a small padded room somewhere if they had spoken of it.
So the spirits of the graveyard replayed their lives night after night, laughing at the same jokes and dancing the same dances, waiting for something to change. But it never did. They never got bored, though. Their concept of forever was no different than their concept of now.
The only noteworthy events were when new spirits joined the old, and when that happened it was a grand occasion for all. It made even the new spirits forget what a different, what a sad, party was being had for them the next day or the day after that.
Sometimes I find it amazing that humans have managed to exist as a conscious race at all. Think about it for a moment – we’re each stuck with our own mind and our own emotions all the time. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there isn’t any escape. When we live with other people, we have to “endure” them all the time as well, but we’re only dealing with the outward projection of this person’s thoughts and emotions. Even living with children, who speak out about what they need and want rather more than adults, isn’t the same as how we live with ourselves.
If I sound rather gloomy or negative here, I apologize, for that is not my intention at all. Of course we all have painful moments where we have a difficult time with ourselves and we feel the need to escape from something that we can never escape from. But that’s not what I’m alluding to in this post – I’m mostly thinking about the mundane, everyday thoughts that we deal with. Our minds are always buzzing with thought and emotion, always trying to figure things out, always thinking things we’d rather not think about. We have control over ourselves, but only to a point. How many times have we tried to get rid of a tune or song that’s stuck in our head? We only succeed when we’re truly distracted by something else, outside of us.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it’s incredible so many of us are still sane, stuck with ourselves as are.
So peaceful, so quiet. The buses don’t work and most people are napping, leaving the streets free of smog and full of children’s laughter and noise. Many kids are on their way to the Scouts meeting. They’ll be noisy once they really get started, but they’re still quiet, in their own building, not yet scattering across the park and playing.
The light has grown dim early, as it always seems to do on Friday afternoons, and there’s a cool, almost chilling, breeze coming in through the slats of the window. There is something so odd about the quiet. Just when it starts to feel eerie, though, a car whooshes past and reminds me that humanity is still there, life is still moving around me.
A sense of calm prevails over every other atmosphere. There can be nothing urgent on this afternoon. Time doesn’t really mean much right now. It feels like the sphere of this point in time and space is just an endless, calm, quiet thing, stretching on until forever. The ticking hands of the clocks betray the lie to that feeling though, and I sigh.
Tearing my eyes away from the spot they’ve been fixed on aimlessly for the past five minutes, I need to give myself a little shake to free myself from the cobwebs. I need to get back to reality now.
Sometimes sleep is the best medicine. No matter what happens, it’s something the body will do naturally, something that can’t be fought or resisted. Sleep tells us things as well – when we don’t sleep well, it’s because we’re worried about something, or something is bothering us without our realizing it. When bad dreams awake us, shaking and sweating, in the middle of the night, more often than not some unknown or unheeded fear is coming to light or finding a way out so as not to worry us anymore.
And when we’re tired – ah! Such a feeling. It can be awful, being tired to the bone. But viewed the right way, it can be wonderful. If you let yourself surrender to it – not even by sleeping, but just by accepting it – you may feel a languor and a calmness steal over your body in a way that is completely unique. When we’re sick, or not feeling well, our body warns us of it by making us weaker, more tired, more in need of sleep. Again, in these situations being tired can feel wonderful, a deep knowledge that crawling into bed now will help, it will rest your body and mind and make you stronger to fight the germs in you.
Truly, sleep is the best medicine.
42.
Har har.
The meaning of life is to find the meaning of life, so when you’ve found the meaning of life, you don’t have a meaning to your life anymore.
Har har.
The truth, as far as I’m concerned anyway, is that there is no meaning to life other than what we make of it. Life is something we’re in all the time, we cannot step outside of it and look at it objectively, finding in it some grand pattern that is the meaning of it.
The meaning of life is your first kiss, your first love, the way your mother looked at you in second grade when you were on stage, the way your brother helped push you on the swing, the way you feel in your best friend’s arms, your favorite coffee brand, your habits. The meaning of life is how you cried when your grandfather died, how you withstood the pain of your arm breaking, the way you toiled to get a good grade, a good job. The meaning of life is your dog barking when you come home, the trivial anger at someone shoving in front of you in line, the way you rant about the things that you’re passionate about and the way you save money every month to be able to pay rent. The meaning of life is LIVING it. What else could it be?
There is a certain feeling of satisfaction that we get after accomplishing things. For instance, if we get a good grade, a promotion, help someone with something important – when we do these things, we feel pleased, happy, content. I don’t know WHY we feel like that. It’s not as if our survival depends on such things. If anything, eating, drinking and breathing are things we get only minor satisfaction from.
Sometimes just knowing we got the smallest thing done makes us happy and satisfied. But seriously, why? Our basic instincts don’t call for us to strive towards anything. That’s what makes us human of course, or one of the things at least – the fact that we do strive, we have goals and wants that extend beyond our basic needs for survival. What a wonderous thing evolution was to bring us to this state.
Then again, when I look over at my cats and see them smiling just because they’re sleeping in a comfortable position, it makes me want to forget all goals and just become a creature of habit and instinct who doesn’t need to do anything more in life than eat, sleep and get scratched behind the ears.
Slightly Ignorant 