Radical Human

The season has changed and winter has come. It snowed last week. 

Snowflakes are one of the most delicate objects in existence – water in its most artistic form setting the erratic fires within.  Just see what they can do when they stay together. I won’t be embellishing about it, but the first time I saw snow coming as heaven’s sunlit glitter to bring this world to a new shine, I literally malfunctioned. It felt like a bliss in me – one that for an unusual and very rare moment, completely filled in the void that I’ve been looking forward to sate in, for a very long time.

Back then, a friend of mine was there to witness it with me,  the pure form of blissfulness that there was. I couldn’t recall another moment when I’ve found myself feeling that way. Time certainly has been one amusing little mistress in that matter. Nevermind. I know winter is not that sacred for many, hence this romanticism that brings with itself might not make sense. But to provide you with context, it takes at least a full day’s travel from my town to see the earth of yesterday covered as white as any new page. 

With time I started observing the wonder this time of the year would bring with itself. The days being shorter, the street lights more warmer and streets themselves, more calmer. Cats were way more fluffier and above all coffee tasted really good. For a brief period of my experience, reality seemed surreal. The best way to describe it is as if it had a certain character of its own. Now this might remind you of cinematic scenes from Norway on instagram stories,or an aesthetic tumblr post but a mere picture can in no way do justice to the aura of the real thing. Many such things would just seem insignificant, but for me it was basically these small things that helped me escape oneself from the ranks of the insane.

The nights were dark and so was the sight of people and especially the sight of her, engulfed in a heavy jacket. Seeing people hidden behind these giant jackets, fluffy caps and mufflers make me wonder though, how their life might be. Or maybe I’m just concerned about hers. More so that I would wonder about ‘the girl’ wearing a massive shawl in the local mall it’s certainly interesting how intriguing curiosity is, especially when most of her is just a figment of my imagination rather than of sight. What’s even more intriguing is how uninteresting they usually seem after we get to know them, personally or simply through visual observation. I kind of get why cats are so eager to know more about their surroundings, even though their curiosity often is amusing. 

Back to winter. To put it simply, I love it. Even the one without snow, back in my hometown. It is so intensely melancholic for me, though I’m not sure if it’s grief or pleasure I experience. Probably both, as in that kind of suffering isn’t specifically unpleasant, or is that love? Regardless, I believe most of my love for winters came from the heavy clothes we have for winter. Well obviously they keep us warm but it’s this distinct smell that they have that I have never been able to describe. Even this summer, when I was packing my clothes in boxes, it had this tingly smell of snow. Again, a melancholic nostalgia – but about when? That I do not know again. 

 I guess we’ve established so far that, for the most part, winters are usually depressing. It’s the blooming season for what we perceive suffering, which I believe is necessary to experience pleasure. Sometimes one may even make peace with it. Except for one kind of it – depression. For me at least, it is something I’m not brave enough to handle. My escapist mindset pushed to search for ways to overcome this feeling. I read an article a few weeks back which was something along the lines of dealing  through winter depression. It also works when you can’t sleep 😉 

Just go to the nearby window, preferably after midnight, open the window, take a deep breath and feel it until every cell in your body has absorbed that crispy cold air.

It feels good doesn’t it?

Now take another deep breath, hold it, hold it until you feel every last bit of winter inside every cell of your body and then slowly release it. Wow!  congratulations you are halfway there. 

The second part, I learned from a friend of mine. She told me that after the first two breaths your body is filled with winter which is a good thing. Now look above and you will probably find a dark blue sky, with or without stars; doesn’t really matter. If you can find the moon that is a plus but it still doesn’t matter. “Let all your uncertainties out of your rusty system into the universe, it’s okay if you let stars hold all your worries for some time. I mean don’t just forget about them and please take them back, as stars won’t be there the next morning”. It might sound weird but we are intoxicated, and such states of mind often produce rather unconventional or abstract perspectives and experiences of reality.

Anyways, the next part is the best one.

Go inside or close the windows and “the stars will always be there. They won’t go away”. Make a cup of tea. Make sure to use honey instead of sugar. Grab a pen, and a paper and start writing letters. Letter to your loved one, letter to the ones no more with you, letter to the person who was playing violin on the gray street, letter to those who are yet to be born. When you are done, find the most fucked up book with the most weird name on it and make sure it has something to do with mathematics, for the sake of the discussion let’s say ‘hilbert space and functional analysis’. That would do the job. Seal all the letters and leave them in that book, and maybe one day you might get a chance to post them”. And then go to sleep, you might feel better and if this doesn’t help, open the damn window and start over. Again! 

Guess we were off track again. 

Fine, let’s move onto the next thing. This part is about the random thoughts I’ve had when I was travelling on a bus. There’s this thing – I think a lot whenever I am on a bus. It’ll be unfair to describe it as overthinking but for the sake of clarification I call it thinking in terms of strings. The good thing however is, that I have a diary and I carry it wherever I go and whenever I have this itchy feeling under my eyes or behind my ears, I write whatever comes to my mind with it. Once again, the same old escapes we find in this grim reality.

21st of Nov, 2020.

I just wrote this date because it seems so classic when you start something with a date written on the top. 

Well, this wasn’t any extraordinary day – just an average day in my average life. The temperature was average. Everything was all regular. And I saw this cat was on a pavement next to a central bus stop while I was heading back to my university. Nothing special so far. But what caught my eye was this pattern of black and white thingy on its back that looked like a butterfly, which I know sounds weird but I don’t know. 

So about that cat. I have never ever seen a cat near that bus station. A year ago I saw an enormous dog but it was a dog. Never a cat before. Again. It’s weird but there’s nothing that we can do about it. 

Moving on I started thinking about it’s pattern and as my friends would normally say, the next minute I’d be connecting things with their worst or most weird possible outcomes. Well it’s a thing. I can’t do anything about it. It’s not really in my control. Why would something weird find its way in one of my regularly repetitive, boring days? Or was it my boredom that found it intriguing, just like doodling seems so interesting during lectures. 

 When I started thinking about that pattern, I somehow ended up with chaos theory, and especially butterfly effect. In short this effect claims that if you choose pepsi instead of sprite from your vending machine, the consequences of that choice can potentially be so radically different, that the pepsi might start a civil war in the USA. In fancy terms “the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.”

Then I kinda started relating it to my life, and inevitably onto the very general conception of life. I once read somewhere that as we go through life we gradually discover who we are, and the worst part of it is that we lose ourselves somewhere in the process of discovering. It is probably from one of Murakami’s works because he has a habit of making these kinds of lucid philosophical statements. So the first thing that I can never fathom is who we are and I really admire those people who can easily say that we are xyz by referring to their profession or their temporary and un-impressive ideologies. And I also admire those peeps who know exactly what they want to be. I mean, I truly believe, knowing what you want and what you want to be is truly a super power. Forgive my pride, but ignorance is bliss.

Why butterfly effect 

Why do you do this to me?

Whenever I have this debate with the people I know, I normally hide behind  ‘the only thing I know and that is that I know nothing’. Real deep. I know lol, pardon me.

And I use it to imply that I don’t know who I am and who I want to be, which by many is quite a simple thing and they say that people normally face this kind of dilemma in their early 20s.

Somebody once told me that not knowing what you want is fine and never knowing what you want is also kinda fine. I really wanted to throw her in the deepest part of hell. Well these were her last words and trust me it sounds weird. What can one say, she chose her last words wisely, but to my displeasure they did nothing to help me figure out the answers to questions i don’t even know.

I mean if you can find a very weird looking cat in the middle of the station then there are different possibilities for all kinds of things out there. Just think about it what if we all are stupid creatures who made a big shiny goals just to survive and evolve and reproduce and do stuff and play ‘amoung us’. What if there is no such thing as a goal what if there never was.

One thing I am sure about the human is that our every action revolves around pleasure (philosophy of happiness), WHAT IF the goals we made, even the very first societies of human civilization, are just a big shiny thing that doesn’t exist,but merely part of our imagination.

Consider this, imagining on a very large scale, and by large I am referring to light years, there are galaxies which, with the so far scientific knowledge, have no interaction with us. But they still exist somewhere out there. Far from crushing us this impressionism of the vastness of space and time in which we dwell can redeem and lighten us.

We are what we want to be, I mean we as a species might one day want to become stupid and might develop some machines which intentionally make us stupid so because we are tired of being smart and we might in near future accept that all the wars and bad things that happened to this plannet were only because of the smart people out there, we might even despise them for the enlightenment, which brought the destruction of the myths we made to keep us sane, and exposed the grim reality of life. It sure sounds fascinating but on the cosmic scale, beyond the ordinary realm of this world, or to be more precise even beyond the physical laws, nothing we will ever do, or fail to do will have the slightest significance. Which in a sense implies that everything surrounding our insignificant and empty lives is simply that – insignificant and empty. To some, this might seem freeing, but I believe they are fooling themselves, simply replacing previous myths with new ones, in a subconscious attempt to escape from what might be the cruelest reality of all. I think smart people out there know it doesn’t matter, nothing matters and they have designed the societies so that we can’t think in such a way.

They can make sure that they can extract the maximum amount of juice from this planet. So the acceptance of the fact that you are what you want to be doesn’t make any sense but at the same time acceptance of the fact that nothing matters might help us to pass the constraint/ bounds set on us by various means (social and natural evolution).

I guess I forgot to mention the evolutions and its relation with the entire thing that was going on in my head. It’s just a fancy theory which is not backed by any scientific evidence or any official statement but I believe that evolution played a major role in creating that big flashy thing that we are so obsessed with. Just look it at this way imagine you don’t have goal, you are out there living a meaningless life and

 Boom!!

You are eliminated by the process of natural selection because mother nature only accepts those who follow its sets of coded rules or to be more precise she hates those who don’t play by the rules and eliminates them.

 In order the first theory says that you don’t feel like having a meaningful life but you still gotta have one because you have to survive and all that stuff. 

The second thing let’s assume you said you still want to have a meaningless life and you quit society, you just packed your bags and warm jacket and coffee cup and went to the woods far far away from humans, you will still or your ideology will still will be eliminated because according to mother nature the only goals we living things have is to survive and reproduce.

When I was thinking about this last thing I just felt a weird stare at me and upon looking around I realized that the bus driver was looking at me as we were on the last station.

Fuck, I did it again!

Me missing the last station means that I have to walk at least 2 km and the bus driver staring at me means that I have been sitting there ideally for quite a while even after he said something in a language which I barely understand. I stepped out of the bus and forgot what I was thinking.

I forgot what the next idea was that was supposed to follow this string. I really want to remember – remember it like a dream, but I just can’t figure it out what it actually was, I think so it was something like “is there something such as having no regrets.

 I missed a big chance to talk to me and think about having and not having regrets or can we live a life with having a lot of regrets and just pretending that we don’t have any.,

I have this thing that whenever I am thinking about something or even brainstorming, once the flow is broken I just can’t go back to the same phase

I still think what conclusion might I have reached if I kept on with those string of ideas but still at the end of the day, I believe which might sound kind of stupid but I still believe there might be others out there, just like me, in another universe who kept on with these thoughts and reached a better solutions and had a better life than ‘me’ of this universe.

But again, having a better life should be a thing that one might want to achieve. Should better life be the next nice big shiny thing?