Tuesday, September 18, 2012
The smell of dead tree leaves amidst chocolate
I cannot seem to think of an appropriate title for this post. The first thing that popped into my mind was a memory that I had (based on a smell that I smell, even as I am typing this). Which simply reminds me that technology has its limitations.
After all, how do you describe a smell the exact way it is to someone? Or a taste? Or a feeling?
Here is where I think of the title. "The smell of dead tree leaves amidst chocolate". To be honest, it's what the smell that I smell right now reminds me of.
I hope that scene description (of my memory) can elicit the imagination of the smell that I smell.
Alright, on to my main point.
I think, if I start living the way some people do, I will go crazy.
I think I really will.
I'm not the sort of person to believe that faith is all you need to live and that trusting in yourself is enough (although I never actually understood the concept of self-loathing). Sometimes you need the little push that your aspirations give you. Sometimes you need the strength that your emotions give you. It's not like you can completely detach yourself from them (although you can come close).
Sometimes, you need that anger.
But really, if I were to live my life that way, for my anger, for my own basic survival instincts, for being myself, I will just go stark raving mad. It's one of the reasons why I practise meditation. In chinese it's called 静心, which, literally translated, means "quieten the heart". I think many people get the impression that to meditate you have to ignore yourself, but that isn't true. When you meditate you become more, yourself. (Okay, so that's a really weird way to phrase it but I don't think there's any other possible way.) You become more aware of yourself and what you're feeling. You can put a name (well, so maybe not a name, but something that lets you identify yourself) to your state of consciousness.
And the thing is, once you can put a name to the feeling, you can let it go. Perhaps that's another way of living.
Meditation isn't about non-sensitivity, it's about hyper-sensitivity.
I'm a very conflicted person. Some moments I want to use all that rage and anger in me and use it to live (like I do sometimes - this is the cynic in me) and other times I want to just live life like everything's water under the bridge. Perhaps those two methods sound very... opposed, because they're both very extreme, and to tell the truth I haven't truly done either yet. They both have their good and bad sides, which I will not go into for now.
Back to the topic.
Perhaps it would have made sense to live in a very self-defensive way if the world I live in (the context?) isn't the way it is now. But the thing is, it is. The key word is balance. Moderation. The subtle combination of thoughts, ideas and most importantly, concepts.
The entire notion of balance is driving my crazy.
I read this book quite a long while back. I don't remember the exact phrasing, but it said something about how you should live a balanced life. It annoyed me at the time.
Pray tell, how do you base your life's principles on the a single word?
And now, I finally understand.
The world doesn't exist like how we imagine it to, and we're small and insignificant. But damn that, I'm going to try and live my life anyway. To be honest I don't care if I change anyone's life or not. I just want to continue existing. And even if I one day stop existing, I pray that somewhere out there, my (or is it truly mine anymore?) consciousness will remain.
Posted at 5:17 PM
