philosophy

Body and Mind

Sweat dripping down my brow and stinging my eyes, muscles cramping and aching, feet pumping along despite the myriad blisters – there is no feeling so satisfying: being in control of your body, utterly and totally, knowing it will obey you despite it’s pains, despite it’s aches.

Then again, there is also such wonder in letting go of such control. Giving yourself up to complete languor, as when falling asleep after a long and hard day. Knowing your body has reached its limit and surrendering yourself completely to a motionless rest. Letting your muscles and limbs twitch as they will, random currents running from your brain to every joint and fiber of your body.

It’s incredible to think what strange vessels our bodies are, capable of every sort of odd movement and feeling, all coming through these invisible, unconscious decisions and chemical reactions that we cannot ever feel.

Winter Time

It’s always extremely strange to move from daylight-saving-time to “normal” or winter-time. It makes you consider how time really is a thing we control. Or rather, the perception of time is something we control. By changing the clocks back an hour, we change the time of dawn, of dusk. Strange to ponder such things.

Yet, this is NOT why I decided to dedicate a post to the changing of the clocks here in the Holy Land. As much as I enjoy BSing about philosophy and pretending to understand the physics, such as they are, of time, I do not believe I could convincingly write an entire post on such things. No, what I wanted to demonstrate here is how religion rules this damn country.

Yom Kipur is coming up, which is a day of fasting in the Jewish religion. A day to apologize for the sins of your past year and turn over to a new page. The religious Jews, who, despite being a minority, have way too much power make the government declare a change to winter-time about a month earlier than the rest of the world. Why? Apparently so they won’t have to fast as much. Tomorrow starts officially at sundown of today in Judaism, and for some reason winter time makes the time between sundown to sundown shorter.

People who don’t even open the fridge on Shabes, since the lord forbids electricity on the Day of Rest,  change the whole freaking clock to suit their needs. I can only say that I see this as RELIGION FAIL.

Imaginary Friends and Make-Believe Games

Children have some remarkable imaginations about them. I was eavesdropping today on the two mothers at work, and they were talking about how their children went into the curious phase – they keep asking “What’s this?” and “But why?” and “How, Mommy?”.

It made me remember the awesome things that we could do when we were kids. We could climb up on the jungle-gym, and we’d decide we were on a ship, and lo and behold, we were on a ship. We could be animals, we could be oppisate genders. I had a particular friend who wanted to be Ariel, the Little Mermaid, and that I’d be her father. This friend was a boy. But it didn’t matter then, did it, because it was normal, we were all just curious.

Imaginary friends were the best thing ever. They were invisible, they had super-powers, they had everything we couldn’t have and everything we wanted desperately. But we never got jealous of them, we never got angry at them. They were the best companions we could ever have.

In Sophie’s World, an excellent book by the way, there’s a lot of emphasis on how the curiosity of children is what makes them demand answers to everything all the time, that philosophers are the ones who never lose that child-like curiosity, the intense need to know WHY.

Getting old and bitter and losing any trace of curiousity is, I think, the most scary thing in the world.