Time
Having a laptop and a recliner and a small room with Currant-Jam colored walls is pretty cool sometimes. It allows you to sit on the recliner with a nice ambience at 1:37am and push words onto google's blogging engine.
I still haven't figured out what I want from this. Whether my goal is to have this be somewhat cathartic or to record my days, or to entertain, or or...
I wonder what motivates or drives other's to write.
There are never enough hours in the day. I was talking with a friend a few weeks or months back, about how the night used to be something magical when we were kids. Midnight used to be ghost hour. For all I knew, the whole world was asleep by midnight. The whole world except some criminals and eccentrics and witches and other mystical creatures one almost wanted to believe. Sure I knew they didn't exist, but if they did, they surely would be awake at midnight, scheming. Regardless of that, midnight was so deep in the night. The first few times I stayed up till midnight at a very early age were always rare and memorable occassions. It was three hours past bedtime. Three hours for a child is an eternity. As a kid you can make 7 new friends in three hours, fight with 2 of them, and befriend them again. Children move through time so much differently than adults. They live in the present, while most of us adults seem to live in (or for) the immediate or distant future. Anyways, I'm digressing.
Since it was such a rare occassion to stay up till midnight, staying up all night was even rarer. Life is very differnet when you've never been up all night to witness dawn. Before that the night seems infinitely deep. It's this mystically soothing and intriguing zone wander into everyday, which you can't get out of unless you sleep. Once you sleep, you somehow magically traverse a dimension in your sleep, and wake up at the beginning of a day. Needless to say this romantic and image of the deep infinite night get's ruined once you stay up a few nights and realize how short it actually is, and how soon dawn comes around.
Like right now I'm sitting here at 2am and I still plan to be up for a while. Back in the day, 2am was 2 hours past midnight, which was just like 'woah!'. I kind of miss that way of viewing things. I wish the night really was this indefinite entity that you could only traverse out of once you fell asleep.
So yea, there are never enough hours in the day. Decades ago, the evenings and nights belonged to a person and his family exclusively. Now we take our work with us, sometimes in spirt, but more often in practice. Even if we don't, we are still slaves to TV shows, Computers, Xboxes etc. Not much us Holy or off limits anymore. We just follow these stupid mundane routines for work and leisure and not always, but very often, they are of absolutely no consequence. It's almost like monkeys, sitting there, scratching an itch when they have one and being pretty content with that sort of life.
Going back to children. If time and life is an ocean you move through, then children are like fish, experiencing the different currents and temperatures in the water, meeting and seeing other fishes go by, being aware of the different qualities in the water, stopping here and there to socialise or rest. Going with that analogy, adults are like submarines. Completely oblivious to the details of their surroundings shy of a sonar to avoid collision with other huge objects, but mainly focused on their destination, not the journey. We are all about destinations. It doesn't even have to be big things. It's the thousands of small things. For example when I get in my car to drive home, I'm only focused on getting home. I don't think to myself "A drive home, the potential to see things and learn things, time to myself to ponder, or listen to some music, or maybe talk to someone on the phone that I've not called in a while". Sure, I do many of those things, but the point is that I rarely live my life as a journey anymore. As a kid, a 20 minute car ride was enough time to daydream epic heroic tales of battles, aliens, monsters and glorious friendships (usually with the aliens or monsters or other nemesi that had to be fought initially).
Now I spend the 45 minute commute stressing about what I didn't get done, what I need to get done today, tomorrow and yesterday, what I need to eat, the things someone said today or 3 months ago that bothered me, and all sorts of other items that generally lack positivity.
Lack positivity, kind of like this post. My next post, or a post in the not too distant future will have to be about something beautiful. It's such a screwy world, but still there's so much that's beautiful. It was that notion that made me think of the whole time and how we live through it thing. As a child you get a full experience even if you don't grasp much of it, but as an adult we are constantly just scratching the the surface of life and all the deep and beautiful things that can be found in it.
Needless to say, I'm guilty of everything I've said. Let's see if sayin it all out loud makes doing something about it a little easier :).
I still haven't figured out what I want from this. Whether my goal is to have this be somewhat cathartic or to record my days, or to entertain, or or...
I wonder what motivates or drives other's to write.
There are never enough hours in the day. I was talking with a friend a few weeks or months back, about how the night used to be something magical when we were kids. Midnight used to be ghost hour. For all I knew, the whole world was asleep by midnight. The whole world except some criminals and eccentrics and witches and other mystical creatures one almost wanted to believe. Sure I knew they didn't exist, but if they did, they surely would be awake at midnight, scheming. Regardless of that, midnight was so deep in the night. The first few times I stayed up till midnight at a very early age were always rare and memorable occassions. It was three hours past bedtime. Three hours for a child is an eternity. As a kid you can make 7 new friends in three hours, fight with 2 of them, and befriend them again. Children move through time so much differently than adults. They live in the present, while most of us adults seem to live in (or for) the immediate or distant future. Anyways, I'm digressing.
Since it was such a rare occassion to stay up till midnight, staying up all night was even rarer. Life is very differnet when you've never been up all night to witness dawn. Before that the night seems infinitely deep. It's this mystically soothing and intriguing zone wander into everyday, which you can't get out of unless you sleep. Once you sleep, you somehow magically traverse a dimension in your sleep, and wake up at the beginning of a day. Needless to say this romantic and image of the deep infinite night get's ruined once you stay up a few nights and realize how short it actually is, and how soon dawn comes around.
Like right now I'm sitting here at 2am and I still plan to be up for a while. Back in the day, 2am was 2 hours past midnight, which was just like 'woah!'. I kind of miss that way of viewing things. I wish the night really was this indefinite entity that you could only traverse out of once you fell asleep.
So yea, there are never enough hours in the day. Decades ago, the evenings and nights belonged to a person and his family exclusively. Now we take our work with us, sometimes in spirt, but more often in practice. Even if we don't, we are still slaves to TV shows, Computers, Xboxes etc. Not much us Holy or off limits anymore. We just follow these stupid mundane routines for work and leisure and not always, but very often, they are of absolutely no consequence. It's almost like monkeys, sitting there, scratching an itch when they have one and being pretty content with that sort of life.
Going back to children. If time and life is an ocean you move through, then children are like fish, experiencing the different currents and temperatures in the water, meeting and seeing other fishes go by, being aware of the different qualities in the water, stopping here and there to socialise or rest. Going with that analogy, adults are like submarines. Completely oblivious to the details of their surroundings shy of a sonar to avoid collision with other huge objects, but mainly focused on their destination, not the journey. We are all about destinations. It doesn't even have to be big things. It's the thousands of small things. For example when I get in my car to drive home, I'm only focused on getting home. I don't think to myself "A drive home, the potential to see things and learn things, time to myself to ponder, or listen to some music, or maybe talk to someone on the phone that I've not called in a while". Sure, I do many of those things, but the point is that I rarely live my life as a journey anymore. As a kid, a 20 minute car ride was enough time to daydream epic heroic tales of battles, aliens, monsters and glorious friendships (usually with the aliens or monsters or other nemesi that had to be fought initially).
Now I spend the 45 minute commute stressing about what I didn't get done, what I need to get done today, tomorrow and yesterday, what I need to eat, the things someone said today or 3 months ago that bothered me, and all sorts of other items that generally lack positivity.
Lack positivity, kind of like this post. My next post, or a post in the not too distant future will have to be about something beautiful. It's such a screwy world, but still there's so much that's beautiful. It was that notion that made me think of the whole time and how we live through it thing. As a child you get a full experience even if you don't grasp much of it, but as an adult we are constantly just scratching the the surface of life and all the deep and beautiful things that can be found in it.
Needless to say, I'm guilty of everything I've said. Let's see if sayin it all out loud makes doing something about it a little easier :).
posted by dazzlingdimwit at 1:36 AM
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