Addicted

Overcast days make me depressed and it has been so since I was a wee little tyke. I remember sitting in my room in Germany looking out the window feeling like the world is ending with every white cloud that I could see shifting in the sky. Needless to say, not the best feeling for a 10 year old. Now, 15 years later I have the same half headache producing pressure that causes me to hide my smile under a sea of melancholy. I have wondered why of all things overcastedness (a word I assure you) puts me in such a foul mood. With no explanation readily available, I turned to look at other times when the melancholic blanket smothers me with its warmth and pallid luster. And this my friends is where addiction comes in. A few years ago i was watching this movie on quantum theory and addiction, how these two were linked I do not remember; however, one thing that stayed with me was the idea of emotional addiction.

How many of us have triggers that set off emotions that we are all to comfortable experiencing? How many of us can feel the onset of that aforementioned blanket before the stimulus even stimulates us? We get so used to feeling a certain way that we run back to it whenever there is a chance; addiction, emotional addiction, physical addiction are all interlinked. A great example of this is body image and for those who diet and exercise. This especially rings true to me and the lifestyle I am living (gradual lost of 20 pounds in two years). How many of us have dieted and exercised for about a month and then stopped. Then had the nagging urge to keep going, but still do nothing. What stops us, what gives us the ability to withstand our goals and progress slipping away? The nagging feeling of defeat  that we have preconditioned ourselves with. We feel as if it is a futile effort that is being wasted away and that even if we keep going we are never going to reach the goal. Now how many other situations can you apply this same reasoning too? How many goals have you let slip away because of this futility? We are addicted to this line of thinking. Our safeplace is half stepped failure, we tried hard so we kind of succeeded, but we didn't reach it so we kinda failed. This halfway house of success is failure and if we stay being comfortable in it, we will feed the addiction. Which a lot of us have for the last 20 or so years.

The question should be; how do we break this addiction, or even can we break this addiction. The answer to this question is I don't know. The only way to stop an addiction is to stop doing the things that you are addicted to. Your safehouse of emotions is a wooden, one door shack sitting on a beach 10 minutes from a tsunami. To make progress, you have to go inland and explore the woods, with woods being your inner psyche and the inland being the world (just in case i was being to metaphorical). Only then when we let our safe-houses be destroyed will we grow. Don't let your fear get in the way of how you want your life to be. To some of us, it already has, but it's up to us to move forward.

Dog

I watch
As my emotional cloud
Changes shape in the air
Turning into of all things
A bright white dog
With his tail wagged low
And his hears pointed down
He sits defeated
He hopes for something
Some freedom
Tha has been deprived
Since his inception
It wants to run
And play in the emerald grass
Kicking gray and white rocks
And chasing lightning bugs
But their glow seems so gar
And the leash that holds him
Is too tightly chained to the fence
For him to sup
On the fountain of life
That is just out of his reach
He can't break free
He can't be free
The wind blows
The dog is gone
But the feeling
Is still there

Stupidity and Intelligence

There are many different forms of intelligence, and much like this ad connotes, anyone outside of the norm has been considered stupid or irrelevant. Don't let people choose what you think. Some of the best ideas came from someone who was bold enough to be like "whatever, I'm doing it".

Illusions and Lies

7:45 pm I sat watching passerbys in Chinatown after 2 beers and an hour and a half of stalling, waiting for my dinner partners to arrive. My mood was generally pretty poor because of the constant reminder of time and the inevitability of it ending. I wondered to myself why when everything is going so well, am I feeling so poorly. But, out of the grey cold cloud that was hovering over my being I realized that it was so that I could think deeper and realize things that I have failed to understand.

I have made a lot of decisions in my life that I believed were right because in my belief system they make sense. However, I wonder how much of my belief system is an illusion. We are born in a culturally clad world, where at first breath we are placed into the framework of our life. Then we are brought up within a veiled world where we are taught to believe in someone else’s beliefs. These beliefs constitute how we see the world. Everything from the way we feel about ourselves to the way we feel about things have been influenced and crafted by the experiences and social dynamics of our life. How many ideas have we had on our own and why are we in constant search of things and emotions that make us feel connected with humanity? And why are people who don't buy into the main schema of beliefs marginalized. It's because people are caught in their own illusions that don't allow them to see anything but it.

Love, hate, nationalism, race, and beauty are all illusions. Illusions that are made real enough by our conscious and subconscious minds that it almost fails to grasp on its own constitution. Why do we feel? The only answer that rang true to me was because we are born alone and without the ability to truely relate to what or who someone is. Some people will talk about empathy for the human condition and how it is central to humanity. But in reality it is all bologna. There are numerous cases in modern history where the failure to acknowledge the human condition for one's own personal reasons have rang a lot harder and clearer than compassion and empathy. Think of something as serious as the nuclear bomb, or as simple as universal healthcare. If we as humans were as empathetic and "good" as people think why do we destroy ourselves?

Now back to love, our inability to feel someone else, to really feel them and acknowledge them as we acknowledge our own life is what draws us to love. It draws us to do things that we hope connect us to someone else more than we are connected to our cell phones or to our family, in which we had not choice. However, what happens when love is unrequited; the startling realization that we really are lonely in the world. And that so called connection that we thought we had, really was an illusion that we created ourselves. That is why it hurts so bad, because it is like looking in the mirror and realizing that everything good you had in life was a dream and that the only thing that you know for certain, or at least you hope you do, is that you are alive.

Now, I am not saying that love or emotion is a bad thing. An illusion that can fill the void left by our supreme loneliness is more than anything that we have. However, I am saying that we are looking for love and emotion to fill the emptiness of knowing that we are alone. An illusion is strong and most of the times it is better to be in an illusion than left in the cold cold world.