So yesterday I read this great sentence: "Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live." The entire article is about how silence is misconstrued as powerlessness, when really, speech, discourse, and analysis can make us even more entangled in a past that need not exist into the present.
Maybe silence is sometimes the best option available to us. What is so interesting about ordinary days, ordinary thoughts, and ordinary people? What is so significant about them that merits so so so many words in proliferating memoirs, reality shows, blogs? Wasn't speech invented for bridging a gap between I and the other? When did it become a tool for making an insignificant, self-important distinction (and thus, barrier) between me and the next? Has it really become so perverse that it now completely serves an opposite purpose to its original one? Have words now, spearheaded by an obsession with Freud's id, Madonna's self-exhibition, and the overuse of terms like "special snowflake", become the chosen tool of an egocentric generation, sharpened into a shiny, colorless point?
Its edges are so sharply defined, its reflective surface so smooth and vacant, its stabs at the defenseless air so persistent and never-ending, its sound(lessness) and fury signifying nothing nothing nothing at all. Is this what words have been reduced to and imploded into? Where has the silence gone? If it's indeed a "drowned" thing, does it still "live"? What would it mean to live underneath such a pond? It's been unthinkably long since I bathed in silence with another. For all I know, the world of communicated silence could have evolved into literal firework shows between two sets of widened eyes, and I would have no idea, because I choose to wade in uncommunicated noise instead.
**
Monday, January 17, 2011
Saturday, January 8, 2011
the examined life
“I never talk about feelings with anyone but you…because you think about these things…and you’re so wise about them.”
This is one of the most flattering things I’ve heard about myself, because well, the main struggle in my life is my overthinking, so it’s nice to know there’s some sort of an up side to that. However, this doesn’t change the fact that this approach to emotions (thinking rather than feeling them) probably prevents me from experiencing them in the right capacity. But this is perhaps the price I’m willing to pay in order to note happiness felt, that I might preserve it for later, instead of simply being present in the moment, perhaps made greater and more magnificent, unsaddled by concurrent mental analysis, only to be left with fleeting shadows afterwards. Or perhaps it is the price I pay for a kind of insurance premium, against the risk of not knowing where feelings come from, or horror of horrors, feeling wrongly. Feeling content when I should be indignant, jealous when I should be grateful, etc etc.
Ignorance is bliss, how I loathe those words! I’d trade it a thousand times over for knowledge of what is true. Happiness is never the end goal, only truth. And somewhere in the unilluminated shadows, there lurks the fear that the truth will not turn out to be beautiful, nor simple, nor happy at all. Every path, whether the destination be happiness or otherwise, has a burden to bear, though for the truth-obsessed, the seeker is made all the more painfully aware of it.
**
This is one of the most flattering things I’ve heard about myself, because well, the main struggle in my life is my overthinking, so it’s nice to know there’s some sort of an up side to that. However, this doesn’t change the fact that this approach to emotions (thinking rather than feeling them) probably prevents me from experiencing them in the right capacity. But this is perhaps the price I’m willing to pay in order to note happiness felt, that I might preserve it for later, instead of simply being present in the moment, perhaps made greater and more magnificent, unsaddled by concurrent mental analysis, only to be left with fleeting shadows afterwards. Or perhaps it is the price I pay for a kind of insurance premium, against the risk of not knowing where feelings come from, or horror of horrors, feeling wrongly. Feeling content when I should be indignant, jealous when I should be grateful, etc etc.
Ignorance is bliss, how I loathe those words! I’d trade it a thousand times over for knowledge of what is true. Happiness is never the end goal, only truth. And somewhere in the unilluminated shadows, there lurks the fear that the truth will not turn out to be beautiful, nor simple, nor happy at all. Every path, whether the destination be happiness or otherwise, has a burden to bear, though for the truth-obsessed, the seeker is made all the more painfully aware of it.
**
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