On yesterday's episode, I tried defining myself. Though there seems to be a lot of sharing here, it's still words on a screen. The thoughts that brought me to type these words will forever be a mystery to the outside world. A lot of times it is a mystery to me too, but usually only so long as I'm unable to form the idea into actual words.
Trying to define myself by myself is kind of silly though. I'll never truly be able to define myself. I'm a string of thoughts in a physical body made of flesh and bone. One of these is in a physically unreachable place and the other is unable to escape its physical limitations. I live in this body which is kind of like a box in which thoughts are placed but thoughts can't actually be placed anywhere. Trying to pin down one's authentic self has been proving difficult.
The other consideration is that of time. These words are being generated at the request of fingers clicking a keyboard today but you will read these another time. The thoughts are from before the electrical impulse is sent down to move from key to key. I'm trying to define myself now in terms of who I've been in the past. I don't want to be the ultimate repository of all this wickedness from my past and yet that's the first method I use to define myself.
There's three or more different gears moving together that I'm attempting to stop and make sense of while they continue to spin and, in fact, need to continue to spin for my continued existence. I hope you've been able to follow along so far because I'm not so sure I have. The inadequacies of language or thought or maybe even the universe or the nature of consciousness make it hard to understand the notion of self. If it's so hard to understand, how will I ever be able to pin myself down with an actual definition?
Before I can get any further into this idea, I want to talk about the links between these things. As mentioned and as must be obvious by now, I express thoughts. The fact that writing is really a series of words expressing thoughts is why I'm drawn to the activity: it feels natural to express myself this way. Some people are feeling people and they can understand emotions and better express themselves in ways related to intuition rather than thought. Because of either a preference for thought or against feeling, I spend most of my time in my head and produce short essays of self reflection like this. If I were a feeling person, I have no idea how I'd answer these questions. Perhaps I would never have the need?
I spend more time in my head while others spend more time in their hearts. I probably have an aversion to feelings because it takes me so long time to digest them and bring them up to my head to roll around and describe in words. I suppose a feeling person might take a while to feel something about a thought but maybe that's just my own bias.
The only way I've ever found to give myself anything resembling definition is when I had someone to live for. If you think of the idea of "space" as in outer space or even the space outside or inside your home. These places, these spaces, are only defined by their inability to be a place. Outside only has meaning when you understand inside. Light only has meaning when you understand the dark.
"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, he nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”" - David Foster Wallace
As the bee provides meaning to the flower, I found myself with an identity and meaning but only because of the relation to the love that gave me an identity with which I felt comfortable. Without a purpose I am adrift and unable to define myself other than through such coarse methods as these.
Imagine love as water. I am like a lake or eventually the ocean at the end of the water cycle. It waits there until it's ready to rise and return to the source of the system. At the source of the river is usually a mountain or somewhere water flows freely. A serene meadow filled with deer and rabbits and all manner of gentle woodland creatures. Punctuated by a billowing waterfall in the distance and embraced gently by a swiftly flowing brook, the source of all my love and life and purpose was a Bob Ross painting made alive. On the ocean side of things, wave caps breaking wildly with a hurricane on the way with nothing but darkness on the horizon.
I lived in the ocean. Lost in my thoughts. Lost in the depths, scared of even breaching the surface. I needed to traverse the underwater obstacles and emerge at the end of the river system and go onward to enjoy the serenity of that happy little valley.
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