a thought

Memory is an assortment of hazy moments, blurry glimpses through dusty windows of our consciousness, and our ill-attempts to peer through them to see our past. As we grow older our perceptions change and what we are consciously aware of gradually expands. There are distinct checkpoints in my life that allowed me to increase the threshold of my perceptions, giving way to broader views. They began as things about myself that I started to realize were universally applicable, like the realization that I am experiencing this life and this world and this space that surrounds me - every sound, every sight, every smell, every taste, and every tangible thing - through my own point of view, just like everyone else. But being that every person has his own point of view, our experiences inevitably differ.

I miss the days before these realizations, when I drew my explanations of the world from my childhood imagination, when I believed that the sun rose and set behind a giant canyon or some kind of crater on the other side of the earth and each day it revolved around us and nestled in that den during the night. Or when I believed that babies were born though the anus, that God could always and was at all times listening to my thoughts. I remember the exact points in my life when I discovered that I have saliva, when I discovered time. My uncle came home boasting a calendar displaying all the days of the week and all the weeks of a month and all the months of a year. Before then all I knew and understood of time was the passing of day into night, this continuous and harmonious cycle, an agreement between the sun and moon taking turns to reign over the sky. But that calendar introduced to me all the particular ways we humans try to organize and micromanage time, with all our endless measurements, dividing up moments into fractions of moments, trying desperately to record our ephemeral existence.

Technology is making this world smaller. Communication is convenient and most of the time, instantaneous. And behind almost every facet of our daily lives, all these little things we now take for granted, there is some sort of rational and logical explanation for the way they ought to work or function, including life itself. Life has become so formulaic and predictable. We place so many expectations on ourselves and others of how to live it, try too hard to subdue and control it, that we forget to just let it happen on its own, without need of reason, or rationalization, or justification.

I think we all just need to slow down our quest for revelations, before there are no secrets left, no more mysteries to solve.