For most of my life my primary concern has been myself. Sure I would care about other people, as much as my programming would allow. In the end though my universe was centered around me. That may sound selfish, but if I'm not around then everything else for me doesn't really matter. It may not have been the best way to run a ship, still it was my way and it was working for me. Mostly. There have been times where I'm watching a show or movie and I see people behaving how I wish I could be. It's an idealized version of friendship. Almost as though a Norman Rockwell painting has come to life. I know this and I still sometimes want it for myself and the people I call friends. That's not to say what I have is bad in any way. It's just more real. People can be thoughtless. I can be thoughtless. More often than not the thing I meant to say comes out as something else and people look at me like I'm trying to swallow a whole octopus. Even with all these blunders, I still knew what to expect.
Watching a lot of movies and television I felt like I had seen the story where a character is going to have a baby plenty of times. Sometimes they're sad, a lot of times they are happy, but almost always they are freaked the hell out. Just when you think you've got the game figured out, a new player comes onto the board. These characters would run around doing all sorts of wacky things or go through montages where they buy baby books, find a good doctor after sifting through all the crazy ones, and then going to various appointments. All this normally happens in the span of like twenty minutes because in the end the movie is still about the characters and not the tiny alien that's gestating inside one of them. The movie comes to an end with the birth of said alien and if you're lucky they may show a little bit of how wonderful it all is. Aw that's nice. I feel like I'm prepared.
We've been having babies since before we could call ourselves human. While I'm not sure I'd say we are exactly experts at the whole thing. I do feel like we've learned enough to be dangerous, but not quite deadly. Honestly it's a miracle that we're alive. Think about all the things that had to happen for you to be here right now? If the exact scenario of your conception didn't happen it's likely you wouldn't be around to read this. Millions of things have to go right for each person to be born. Change the timing and a boy may be a girl. Change the environment and maybe the whole thing falls apart halfway through. Our bodies are these complex mechanisms that we really have very little control over. Sure we can shovel fuel in the form of our favorite flavors into it in order to keep things running, but we can't exactly tell our kidneys to step up their game. Most of the time I can't get my stomach on board with the same food I've eaten a hundred times before Sometimes I wish there was some kind of external monitoring system that told me what the hell was going on inside of me. I suppose it wouldn't matter because without control that information is useless. I could tell you my heart rate right now, but that doesn't really give me the whole picture of all the other things connected to that piece of information. Now think about how inside someone they're building a completely new person from scratch. Sure I helped in my small way, but it was really a fire and forget. Somehow it's putting together its own brain. If it's doing that then it means we did that ourselves at some point. We really created ourselves.
Knowing this it kind of makes me sad to think how easily we forget about the miracle that is our own lives. Sure reality means there's more to it than simply marveling at how amazing our bodies are. As adults we're kind of over the whole magic of life and the world around us. Now go watch a little kid in the same environment and notice how ensorcelled they are by the smallest things. I can't quite remember when the world stopped being so overwhelmingly magical to me. I think with the internet and the world being full of people who are genuinely trying to hold onto or at least recapture that sense of wonder, it's not a lost cause. Children are the constant reminder that the world can be a wondrous place. While they're running around being amazed at everything in the world, the adults are running right behind them being terrified of that same world consuming the tiny versions of ourselves. This means my primary concern is no longer myself. Instead it's going to be this external portion of myself that is scampering off to go eat dirt and actively put itself into dangerous situations because it has no idea that a mountain lion wielding a chainsaw isn't something you run towards.
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Thursday, July 2, 2015
On The End of the Preamble
With so many things in our lives there is a build up. The weeks leading up to Christmas. Months planning a wedding. Getting ready for a trip across the world. We prepare ourselves and look forward to these moments as they approach. Then they happen and life continues. I remember as a kid loving the Christmas season. Watching as everyone got more and more excited by putting up lights and decorations. The number of presents under the tree subtly getting bigger as we got closer to that big day. By Christmas morning excitement was at its highest and that's when the bass drops, usually leading to wrapping paper everywhere. The rest of the day you kind of bask in the afterglow of that level of joy. The next day you wake up and it's behind you. Hopefully it hasn't been disappointing, but not matter what experience you have, the moments we look forward to the most will eventually be in the past and on their way to being memories. A part of me wonders if that's why the idea of heaven is so appealing to people. It's a place where you get to be with all your loved ones and live your best moments for ever. I think most people would classify that as wonderful, even if they don't believe such a thing makes any kind of logical sense. I suppose the natural inclination is to start looking forward to something else, which in itself isn't a bad thing. It's good to have upcoming things in your life that you are excited to become reality. Maybe that's what life really is about. Moving onto the next thing while enjoy what came before.
The world is a strange place when you return to it. At least that's how it can feel if you've been away for any longer than normal amount of time. I look around at the things that are familiar and yet somehow foreign. It's been said that you can't go home again because it's not the place that has changed, but rather you that is different now. When some people leave the familiar all they can see are the differences in what they see now compared to what they've always seen before. This isn't exactly a bad thing, but focusing on that can make it harder to appreciate something new. I'm not saying one should just accept something because it's different. It's like learning a language though, where you will have an easier time if you stop translating and just start accepting the new word for the old object.
Still it's not until you've been away from something that you really see it for what it is or maybe what it once was. I remember coming home from college my first year and seeing the house I grew up in. It was the same place it was six months ago when I had left it, but I felt like I had seen and done so much in that small amount of time that it felt smaller on a fundamental level. It was still very comfortable. In the years since then I've returned home several times and each time that house is something different to me. It still has all the old memories. The context for me being there changes though, which in turns means I see the entire place differently each time. It's hard to imagine that one day the home I grew up in won't be available anymore and I'll never be able to return to it.
We often don't realize when something is coming to close. Sure we can see the last day of school coming or know when it's time to say goodbye to our visiting family members. There are times when we know we won't see someone again or won't do something again, but more often than not the last of something sails by us without much notice until later, when we realize that we'll never get another chance at it. People often say live life like each day was your last. It's when we know that there will never be more that we embrace how special something is, even if it's normally not special at all. It's next to impossible to lead a normal life living that way. That kind of sentiment is usually saved for characters in movies and those unfortunate enough to know that their days are limited so it's best to actually live like there aren't a lot of tomorrows, because there might not be. Most of us though will get up tomorrow and probably not think about how yesterday was the last time that ever was going to happen. Sometimes that's a good thing though. That could mean yesterday was the end of what came before and while it's sad that you won't get to go back and experience it again, tomorrow is the beginning of something new. Maybe it's the first day rather than the last one.
The world is a strange place when you return to it. At least that's how it can feel if you've been away for any longer than normal amount of time. I look around at the things that are familiar and yet somehow foreign. It's been said that you can't go home again because it's not the place that has changed, but rather you that is different now. When some people leave the familiar all they can see are the differences in what they see now compared to what they've always seen before. This isn't exactly a bad thing, but focusing on that can make it harder to appreciate something new. I'm not saying one should just accept something because it's different. It's like learning a language though, where you will have an easier time if you stop translating and just start accepting the new word for the old object.
Still it's not until you've been away from something that you really see it for what it is or maybe what it once was. I remember coming home from college my first year and seeing the house I grew up in. It was the same place it was six months ago when I had left it, but I felt like I had seen and done so much in that small amount of time that it felt smaller on a fundamental level. It was still very comfortable. In the years since then I've returned home several times and each time that house is something different to me. It still has all the old memories. The context for me being there changes though, which in turns means I see the entire place differently each time. It's hard to imagine that one day the home I grew up in won't be available anymore and I'll never be able to return to it.
We often don't realize when something is coming to close. Sure we can see the last day of school coming or know when it's time to say goodbye to our visiting family members. There are times when we know we won't see someone again or won't do something again, but more often than not the last of something sails by us without much notice until later, when we realize that we'll never get another chance at it. People often say live life like each day was your last. It's when we know that there will never be more that we embrace how special something is, even if it's normally not special at all. It's next to impossible to lead a normal life living that way. That kind of sentiment is usually saved for characters in movies and those unfortunate enough to know that their days are limited so it's best to actually live like there aren't a lot of tomorrows, because there might not be. Most of us though will get up tomorrow and probably not think about how yesterday was the last time that ever was going to happen. Sometimes that's a good thing though. That could mean yesterday was the end of what came before and while it's sad that you won't get to go back and experience it again, tomorrow is the beginning of something new. Maybe it's the first day rather than the last one.
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