A Second Too Late

Okay, pretty good weekend/start to the week. The mode of this weekend seems to be not doing homework, as that's exactly what I did not do! Which is nuts, so I'm trying to make up for it some tonight (Biblical Hebrew baby!). Friday was pretty much hang out with the cool cats from international coffee hour all day; we watched a movie, went to the Meigs acappella concert, went and finished the movie, returned it to the library and then went to a dance that was completely for us! (We were the first ones there, and the first ones to leave, hehe) Saturday was pretty cool - did stuff, stayed up until like 0800 or something ridiculous. Sunday was pretty good too. I slept. And then did some homework. Watched Vicki Cristina Barcelona (sp hax?) which was a pretty over the top movie by Woody Allen. Apparently it's made *only* for guys, as any girl who saw it said it was pretty terrible. But maybe that's why it's so good!

Anyways, this post's inspiration draws from timeliness. Continuing in the chaotic theme of the last entry, this will progress for an unknowingly long amount of time, but this time I have no structure. I just got back a second too late (for what you might ask? Well stay tuned, you might be able to figure it out, but no promises). This seems to happen to me a lot, or at least not infrequently. It probably happens to me just the same as everyone else, but I always notice it because quite honestly when you miss something by just an instant, it sticks in your mind, sometimes for a long time afterwards. This always evokes varying, yet not dissimilar reactions from me. So, now we delve in on another journey into the mind of Todd... (Are you anxious? I know *I* am!)

Basically it rolls itself out like this: something in me clicks/makes an instantaneous decision and I set off to do that/carry out the action right away. For simplicity, we'll say most of these events are very small and seemingly insignificant things (they could be anything really, even as simple as going to a specific place). To be fair, sometimes I get an urge to do something random like this and actually deeply consider it before I decide to take action. It seems a little bit ridiculous to deeply consider something as simple as these things, but for some reason it seems like life is hanging in the balance to a certain degree. (And to be honest, it is a little bit. I mean, we only get to make one definite decision/action every moment in time, and that can never be undone or changed. Our life is on one path, even if that path has infinite possibilities for the future - the past is always the same) I usually seem to get very anxious when I start to considering doing these things or not, and I'm not entirely sure why - it's probably something to do with the infinite possibilities of carrying it out and what will happen afterwards. (I mean, they ARE random considerations, right?)

I think it's important to note my ambiguity and vagueness here (okay, I'm teasing just a tad, but not really). It's really hard to give a concrete example because these moments are so random and undefinable, and also very fleeting. They pass as soon as they came to be, whether fulfilled or unfulfilled (I think they remain unfulfilled more often, but now that I think about it I can't say either way). Sometimes I'm very deeply disappointed, sometimes I don't ever think about it again. This seems to vary directly to how much time I spend considering acting it out, but there are rare cases when I can be very disappointed when I've acted without any consideration whatsoever, so this rule has exceptions. This seems to be a logical psychological conclusion - obviously if I attach more value, time and consideration to an idea and decide to go through with it, the more disappointed I will be when it doesn't work out the way I planned. But we have to look deeper here, because that's not all that's going on.

This may start to get very strange and philosophical, and I'm not sure how it will pan out, but I'll just be as honest and sincere as I can, and hope for the best. So, drawing from an earlier post, I described myself as living an enchanted life through my worldview. This is fairly accurate. While most of the time, purely for practicality, I adhere to logical and earthly motivations and considerations for everyday/mundane things - sometimes my inner worldview takes over and casts a very poetic and ethereal view on the world and everything in it. A good analogy is simply that it's like looking at life through a kaleidoscope compared to everyday glasses. Everything is incredibly beautiful, scintillatingly so. Everything has a certain otherwordly quality to it, think of it like this: imagine all objects as not having a definite shape, and swaying or being blown about in gentle breezes and sometime strong gusts of wind. The malleable outline of objects transform (contort is NOT the right word, as it is a very natural, smooth flow. It's very wrong to use hard consonants to describe it [I told you it was poetic, even the word choice of describing it matters]), and they kind of swirl and sweep into each other. Colors blends and fill things up, only to meld and warm into other objects. It's kind of like a pattern of highlighting - once colors meld with certain objects and my focus becomes fully atuned to that idea, it will pass out from the object and swirl towards a new collection of objects that form new ideas.

Think of the colors moving from object to object as wispy, colored smoke (by colored, think light oranges, luminescent blues, all sorts of prettiness and fantasy). Now that we have some sort of relevant image, take the feelings and emotions you might experience by seeing all these sights - awe, amazement, peace, tranquility, serenity, etc. and apply it to everyday situations. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well it is. Everything in the world can take on these crazy meanings, stir up unrelated emotions, impact your heart and mind in extraordinary ways, and basically just change your perception of everything. Some might say this is lunacy, but I like to say that I'm not on an acid trip or anything, it's merely feelings and different perspectives that rule my world at these times. Also, it can be very fleeting - I can be grounded to reality very easily most of the time, and I can recognize what is happening around me in an everyday view if I need to or desire. This is a very incomplete description - it merely scratches the surface, and if it were the topic of this post I'd go much deeper into it to give you a much stronger relation to it. But since it is merely useful as a tool to explain what I need to here, I'll now tie it in. (Don't worry, I'll probably expand greatly upon this in future posts, it's an integral part of my life)

So now we're sitting here thinking: "Man, this guy is crazy as a fudgesicle, what's the point in all this madness?!!? Is this a cry for psychological help????" Nope, sorry. Basically, this alternate viewpoint crops up randomly from time to time (similar to these random feelings to make random decisions! Uh oh, a coincidence??). If you remember from the last post, the "Chapel experience" was one of these episodes. These episodes seem to make me deeply consider life's meaning and the meaning of everything around me in completely random and ridiculous ways (remember, it gives significance to completely mundane and random things sometimes). I think this has a direct connection to the significance I give to my spontaneous events.

Often it takes strong emotions or serenity for an episode to occur, and these little random events seem to be a perfect way to accomplish that. They have the same idea of taking seemingly insignificant things and giving great import to them sometimes (just like the episodes, sometimes what is important and meaningful in them is very important to me in everyday life). But they're such little and insignificant things that it shocks me to find me so attached to these ideas - it's an incredibly romanticized and dramatized occurence. Sometimes it doesn't matter at all to me, and this presents some options for interpretation (because if they always meant a lot to me, that would be fairly straightforward in trying to interpret).

So what can this all mean to and for me? Let's get at the heart of it. I make these decisions that randomly pop into my head because I *feel* I need to, or that they *deserve* some special attention or consideration. This is very weird to just happen without reason. So I conclude that there must be at least one reason that is not consciously in my mind for why I feel the need to consider and carry out these actions. This leaves a few possibilities. Either there is some logical reason subconsciously that's too basic for me to put into logical, conscious words, or it's some kind of emotionally trained response, or is something integral to who I am/how I live/exist. This last options has seemed to produce the most fruit for me personally, as it's just more realiastic to think that it has to do with some integral part of my worldview/personality/soul/what-have-you. Obviously it's not exclusive coming from one direction, but this seems to be the heart of the matter, and that's what we're after right now!

Let's look at this idea more in-depth, and see what we can find. The need to consider and make decisions about seemingly random events seems to come from some integral part of my being/worldview. Okay. This isn't going to be a piece of cake. There are a lot of things to consider here, many of which I can't think of from my very subjective point of view. I don't know how I have reacted subconsciously/partitively to every event that has ever happened to me, so I can't claim to have inexhaustible knowledge of all my beliefs and feelings about everything. This being the case, I have to take a much more realistic approach of looking at my current values and beliefs in order to extract what seems to be the basic motivation of my life.

Whew, that sounds much easier! (Hah!) So, uhh, yeah. Everything I believe and feel, and the *basic motivation of my life*. This is outright ludicrous. So let's do it. For the sake of everything holy, and for the matter that time is not endless, I'm going to try to discriminate between my values and beliefs and pull out what I have thus far concluded to be relevant to this. Basically, it has to deal directly with how I perceive the world and my connection to it. This makes sense, considering the episodes seem to deal directly with how I perceive the world, and these random events allude to how I feel about what could possibly happen in the world (the future, consequences of my actions, etc).

So, how does this relate to my view of how the world and I interact? It's a little complex to state plainly. I have deep feelings and beliefs on this matter that are hard to vocalize as they are akin to "gut instincts" or "deeply held religious beliefs." Lately I've tried to explain it as the feeling where you just *know* something. I assume that if you believe in God, it's the same type of feeling - general knowledge that what you know is right. (This may have less to do with belief, however. It seems to be a feeling I *could* believe in, but I believe in it because I *know* it) Okay, so what are these knowing feelings I have about the world? It's a little bit of a stretch, as it's hard to say whether or not I'm positive I believe in them myself, but they're there nonetheless.

I love the world. My favorite place in the world is my home in Pepperell. When I'm there, I'm the safest in the world, the strongest, the most enduring, everything maximally exuberant. It feels like the center of the universe to me (the center of my world/life, more accurately). The energies of the world seem to coalesce there for me. This is a good place to start from. I feel most naturally in the world and a part of life when I am there. I get my episodes most frequently when I am home, often around sunset when I go out and look at the sky and trees around. I just feel completely part of the world and I have this understanding of my existence in tandem with all that is around me. I kind of assimilate into the world and become one with it, as is the common phrase. It's just a completely natural feeling of belonging. This will serve us well examining my view of the world.

Everywhere I seem to go, the world seems to be "looking out for" or "helping" me along. This is very possibly simply my *perception* of the world, as these episodes seem to go a long way in reinforcing this idea to me. Basically, when I need strength or help, I *always* seem to find it by going somewhere in the world and "drawing in" its energies. I simply go somewhere and assimilate into the world like I do at home. This assimilation process can only be described as the most intense of episodes with an amazing sense of serenity. This allows me to have a kind of personal relationship with the world around me. Like I said in the last post, while I was in the Chapel I addressed my words to the world/whoever would listen. While that had a much more specifically deific quality to the address, it was in the same vein. The main difference is that when I'm assimilating into the world, I don't need to address anyone *usually* (although I do sometimes use words thought to something). I don't even usually use words in my thoughts for at least most of it. I just kind of let my emotions and feelings speak for me to the world, which seems to listen and understand and provide some kind of harmony that completely fills me and heals me. (This healing is very unique to the situation, as it doesn't *cure* heartbreak or the like, it only heals it for a while. It's just a general "things will be okay" healing)

This has over time created an incredibly affection in my for the world. Most hopes, dreams and such I assume are heard by the world and understood. I also seem to have the belief that the world tries hard to make it very possible for these dreams and hopes to come to fruition, and THAT is the key to understanding my feeling towards random events. Basically, if the world is trying to help me, I've come to interpret these seemingly random feelings as the world TELLING ME that there's something incredibly important and helpful for my hopes and dreams that I should be doing. Now, honestly, this is beyond ludicrous, and I can logically see that. But it doesn't matter one bit, as I feel it integrally. It's as much a part of me as any feeling I've ever had. There just *seems* to be some sense that the world is helping me out, and these spontaneous events therefore have extreme importance.

It's very weird to consider the outcome of these events and to judge if they've had significance to what has transpired later. It would probably be impossible to say if my success in any of these events has gone on in the future to produce fruit and benefit me. Relationships with others and events and actions by everyone generally are a culmination of absolutely everything that has happened up until that point, so absolutely any tiny thing one does at any moment in time could be credited with helping do almost everything that happens in the future. The possibilities are ridiculously infinite. So this makes testing any theories I have about this pretty much impossible. And that means it has to go off faith.

And is my faith always constant? Is it always as strong as it is in the most extreme of cases? Nope. I've already stated that sometimes I'm deeply disappointed and sometimes I'm not at all. Generally, my mood/other things at the time seem to be able to influence the impact that these events have on me. Now here you could argue that they therefore don't seem to have significance and don't seem to be part of some plan set up by the world for me. But I don't think that's exactly fair - because these events usually feel like they have significance. Sometimes it might be the unfulfillment of these events that has more significance - to me, if I don't succeed, it may be the world telling me something and warning me; the world could be telling me that I don't really have control of the future and maybe even the world doesn't, so I shouldn't try to hard to influence my future. This is why I generally just go with the flow. (I say that a lot, and I mean it) I generally seem to adhere almost perfectly well to the idea of no regrets - I know what I do at the time I do it is what I ultimately wanted to do after I weighed all my options. This is very important - as I couldn't live with the idea that my future has been ruined or completely changed because I forgot to tie my shoes right or something (whether it be very important or not at all).

I used to, for a long time in my life, worry that everything I did was changing my future constantly and that any of the things I did could lead me to a future I didn't want, or more importantly, for which I wasn't "destined." That's an incredibly hard deal to swallow, and I'm thankful for my personal revelation that exactly what happens is "meant" to happen simply because it did. Your destiny is either mapped or it isn't, but you can't exactly "change" the future, because everything you do you do. You can't change past actions, and your present is entirely dependent upon them, and so your future is too. You could say that you're changing the future by thinking about what effect certain actions would have in your future and then taking the action you most desire, but uhh.. that's what people do... Quite honestly, every decision you make is one in which you commit to and think will yield the best outcome (or at least the one you're most likely to accept). So really, you have no effect on the future by deciding what to do, because you were always going to do *something,* and that something is *EXACTLY what you did!* Basically, the future is a ridiculous idea, as it is what it is ONLY WHEN it happens. And then it's not the future anymore, is it? Heh heh heh.

So if we can't change the future ("directly" would be a good compromise for those who think you can), the past, or how we feel in the present, what can we do? Well, we can only decide what to do right now (and plan for the future, but doing that is also just making a decision to make a plan). So basically everytime one of these spontaneous events pops up, it's can have AMAZING significance to me because it's the only thing that matters at the time! That decision will affect everything, but my decision about it was always meant to be, so to speak, so there's nothing of which to be afraid. But that still doesn't mean I can't be anxious about it, because I can still *think* that the outcome of my decision matters. And realistically, the decision itself matters as it determines what I'm going to do right then, which is necessary for everyone to do at every instant they're alive. You could probably construct a definition of being alive and human as having to always make decisions when capable (aka conscious, or in control of your situation, as in dreams).

So, am I justified in caring so much about these random spontaneous events? To me I am, but I see no reason why anyone else couldn't disagree. I just give importance to strange things sometimes. These random little events technically could end up being the most significant things that ever happen to me, or they could always just be little things that aren't even relevant at the time. I honestly don't know, as I don't know the future. I only hope that the world is looking out for me, or that I can always continue to perceive that it is. I think there's something in these little events, but that's only a feeling. I'll just go with the flow and hope for the best. May your future be as bright and full of love as I hope mine will be.

And really, I was only a second too late.
0151