Metaphoresis: Uncertainty
So how real is any of this? Most of my life I've been convinced that it is what we want it to be... and if it sucks, well, that's literally your problem, fix it. Change your circumstances, change your attitude, change your perspective, change your expectations. Do something. Existence is what we need it to be, and it is within you to alter what needs to be altered. Life is perception, all else is beyond you. Metaphoresis. You can fly if you want to fly... but the uppermost law is to know thyself.
what if everything around you
Several days spent with fever... out of control, an infection having its way with me, keeping me in a state of constant pain and worry, tossing but confined to the bed. Is this normal, or am I weak? Should I have tried to work? Should I go to a doctor? Should I take another pill? Should I take all the pills? Would that be better, smarter, than fighting this the way the caveman did, with no help from technology?
isn't quite as it seems
After all, what are we but the sums of progress? If we cast that aside, are we losing what makes us better than we were? Are we better than we were? Does the shit I do on a daily basis make any more sense or serve a higher purpose than fishing for termites in a sweaty forest somewhere?
what if all the world you think you know
Looking at death strips away the bullshit in your life. Pain can do the same. I doubt I was close to dying, but you don't have to be there for it to fill your head. A flyby with a view does fine. Fat bastards yelling at me at work, the power company clamoring for money I won't owe it for another week, a piece of the all-important computer frying and falling out... none of this matters. Everything gets the volme turned down. You try to remember what matters.
is an elaborate dream?
I've always been more aware than most of the larger world. The wide view. The big picture. I consider this a handicap. The wide view is terrifying. many people spend their lives trying to look and feel large... I cannot, I don't even try. I spend much of my life frantically, desparately trying to forget my smallness. It's as if the universe has an atmospheric pressure that only has power if I think about it. It's best not to.
I am a splash in an ocean of humanity. My actions are waves... they travel as kinetic energy to collide and interact with other waves and other wavemakers. My thoughts trigger the waves... every thought, every impulse has power over something... I am a little god, as we all are little gods, and we all make our own little universes. Listening to someone prate about Heisenberg feels to me to be the very hight of arrogance. Oh, we've learned something about the universe, have we? How very good for us, and what is that? Indeed.
All my life I've felt... not destined, but I've felt myself moving in a particular direction. As I grow older and wiser and burn my hands over and over I've begun to descry what that might be, and begun to help it along myself. I will accomplish massive things, in quiet ways, in ways that fit my own private state of being. For a little while I'd stopped paying attention to this process, and now that I am alone again suddenly the silence is absolutely deafening. It has taken awhile for me to even separate the noise of my own course fom the bakground hum of existence.
I now percieve, perhaps too late for me to be comfortable, that this is a short calm before a storm. I am not adrift, as I thought, in an ocean of silence, but rather sealed more literally in a tight-walled chamber of my own making. My entire life I have carefully selected and assembled pieces of myself... some wisely, some not... and there are areas I've neglected, as well... but it is now coming to the time when I realize that I am nearly fully formed, and the shell of my existance has become quite literal. I am trapped not in a prison, but in a firing chamber. As this has dawned on me I have scrabbled at the walls of this cage, panicking, begging for time, but to no use... and now I startle at every loud noise, each worse than the last, but knowing that when the pin finally strikes, its roar will fill the world and I will very quickly be in a very different place.
I wonder if that world will be ready for me. I hope I am aimed at a worthy target when it happens.