My Translucent Mind

Why are things the way they are, and why am I feeling the way I do right now? Who is to tell what will be alright and what the right decisions are? Who is to say anything but otherwise?

Some people are happy, some people are sad. Some people are content, some people are mad. Some people love and some people hate.

Where am I on that spectrum of opposite feelings? More to the negative than to the positive, but that's just to say the least. Everything's been melancholy and nothing has gone great. I didn't ask things to go great. I merely hoped things would go well, being conservative with my expectations only because they never turn out the way I would want them to. And with that expectation, has everything gone "well"? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that nothing essentially has gone wrong but no as in nothing essentially has gone right. I have not been put in scorn by people I know and associate with, but I have not been accepted in the way I would want to be accepted by the people or persons that I want acceptance from. I shouldn't even ask to be accepted. What kind of person am I? Where is my dignity? Where is my pride?

To me, those feelings, those people, those thoughts, are like a magic spell that opens an old door, a door that should stay closed.

I ask this of you: have you heard of this story before?

There was once a man that went on a safari. He injures his leg during a hunt. He's in the middle of the savanna with no means to treat the wound. The leg rots and death approaches. At the last minute, he's picked up by an airplane. He looks down and sees a land of pure white below him; glistening in the light is the summit of a snow-capped mountain. The mountain is Kilimanjaro. As the man gazes down, he feels the life flowing out of him and thinks, "That's where I was headed." He dies soon after.

I hate stories like that.  Men only think about their past right before their death, as if they were searching frantically for proof that they were alive.

Reason exists in many forms and expression, but there isn't any to search for it as a means to justify your existance, or to myself, my existance. There doesn't need to be any contemplation for why something happened. It's all right there, right in front of your face. You are only blinded by your ambition because you think you have some valued existance in this life, and by doing so you miss the big picture.

There doesn't need to be a reason for death, sadness, anger, happiness, or love. Especially love. Because these ideas, these things, are the ones that reveal themselves to you. The reason is all there, the reason is all in yourself.

When I think about you, I think of this:
Everything has a beginning and an end. Life is just a cycle of starts and stops. There are ends we don't desire, but they're inevitable. We have to face them. That's what being human is all about. Simply put: the past is the past and the future is the future. A man is a man and a woman is a woman. The present is the present. I am who I am and you are who you are. That's all there is to it. Do we really matter? Do I matter to you as much as you matter to me? And do you really matter to me as much as I matter to you?

Or do we just think it does?

I hate being sentimental.

Loveless Rationale

I met a girl once.

She wasn't one of those typical girls. She was the ones that you would find yourself ocassionally glancing over in her direction, even when you didn't mean to. The ones that will push you away, because of the comfortable unfamiliar feelings you feel around her, but always made you come around because being closer meant more than being proud, or being unapologetically stubborn.

I would confide a secret in myself that this is some triteful little thing, but I knew I wasn't telling myself the whole truth, only because I didn't know what I was looking for. And as natural as things came, they left with the same manner. I stopped looking, I stopped believing, and I stopped feeling. I thought that was a simple answer to a multi-layered question. I knew she would be around, but I believed that this kind of demeanor would serve both of us a better purpose. That's what I used to believe back then, anyways. As things started to change, and as time progressed forth, this fragile eggshell belief didn't hold stable to the changing circumstances. Why was I wrong? I was wrong because I tried to falsely rationalize myself into accepting in a delusion that was easy to believe. It would have been easy to just believe that things are as they are because some outside force made it so, but it's nothing to accept the conventional way of thinking.

I am no discoverer, I am no conqueror, I am no explorer, and I am no thinker. I am just complex as I make myself to be and to be as simple as such. What has been felt and experienced again and again was unexplainable, even to myself.

That was a share of thoughts I had recently and it goes without saying that it reflects on some aspects of my life. What has been written might not make sense but it's what I could salvage from my memory of my analysis of my past hopes and dreams, call it what you may. It's funny really. I make a big talk about this but in the end, what has been accomplished? Who knows. I certainly don't.

There's no dignified way of being apathetic or being stubborn, so let's go forth together. It's time for this sail to seek new wind, and to discover what lies beyond this cove of everything beautiful.

I'll be where I always have been.

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot

One of these spacecraft, a two spacecraft mission, was called Voyager and in 1989 after its brilliantly successful explorations of the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune system, it became possible to do something I had wanted to do from the very beginning of that mission and that is to turn the cameras around and look back from beyond the outer most planet at our world. We succeeded in doing this and the image that resulted was of a single pale blue dot momentarily in a sunbeam. 

That's here. That's home. 
That's us. 


On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. 


The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. 


Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. 


Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. 


Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. 


It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

It's not that I don't care...

but it's that I don't mind. I don't mind what you believe, I don't mind what or who you worship, and I don't mind what principles you follow. I don't mind that you believe a God or gods created you, and gave you a purpose. I don't mind that you think an omniscient and omnipotent creator was the reason why you got your "perfect" boyfriend/girlfriend or social status or job or anything of value. I don't mind it just as long as you are yourself, and stay true to everything that you believe in. After all, you're not going to live forever.

I care, I just don't mind.