Being A Life

I don't need to eat, scroll, watch, or play in order to be happy. I don't need to sleep, rest, recover, or work out. The most fundamental quality of happiness is  ego desilution. To be empty, grounded, and present in the moment. But that is the natural state of a person who is perfectly healthy. A healthy person is not in an eternal state of flow. He/she also experience ups and downs, in both productivity and slumber. A living organism grows, thrives, starves, and faces roadblocks. It experiences periods of decay where it sheds the unnecessary, and becomes lighter. Life is a continuous process of creation and destruction. A microcosm of the universe in action.

Yet, it can be said that in the ideal environment, a creature has no need to ponder such notions. Imagine a country landscape where you have to grow crops, hunt, trade, and secure your means of survival. Come nightime, you gather around the table with your family and the community at large, and break bread together. Children make friends with the neighbors, find love nearby, and grow old while making an honest living. Simplicity is the ultimate form of majesty. That which can be executed and learned by practice, requires no need for complicated explainations. This, seems to me the essense of true happiness.

An empty state of mind wholly focused on creating something that will outlast its being. One the one hand, there is a temptation to label this quality as significance. An animal prefers to find a deeper purpose than simply perpetuating its existance. But that might create a false distiction between some natural way of being against a man's higher needs or some sort. The more I try to reason and convince myself into differentiating betweent he right and the wrong, I find it only amounts to digging a deeper hole to bury myself into, and a heavier load to carry. As I condemn and admonish certain activities while glorifying and trysing to encourage other, all that arises within me is a hightened state of resistence.

The more I try to justify, intellectualise, and demonize, the more I end up struggling. I find myself unconsciously sliding toward the exact opposite direction than the one I intended to move in. As I hype myself up and motivate every cell in my body to turn over to a new leaf, the emotional reaction that arises automatically is of a child being scolded and humiliated. I feel like shutting down and burying my head into the ground. All these things, I've noticed time and time again. Mo' money, mo' problems. - B.I.G. Hence, I think the reality is much more simple than that. Since the notion of natural vs. artificial is problematic on its own, its better to assume that there is no such thing as truly artificial. Everything that exists must, by definiton be a part of nature, and hence, natural in the truest sense.

Life's most natural instince, based on what little I know, seems to be the need for novelty. The spirit always craves for the new, while the body needs the old in the form of stability. Makes since when you follow the paradoxical analogy as a whole, life seems to have an otherworldly element to it, with the many mysteries of consciousness. Meanwhile a body is essentially matter, reorganized for new purposes. Nothing seems more symbolic of death than a skeletal, or a piece of rock that once was a part of something else. Now, just laying on the ground, privy to forces as mindless as itself. A rock has no wishes and feels no pain, whereas a living being always changes. How does a thing keep on changing all the time, unless it desparately needs something new to continue?

That's the whole appreal of the so called addictions. You can get way more milage on new experiences from video games, movies, and pop culture. You can develop and experiment new tastes, and nothing screams novelty more than the scolling provided by social medias. Talk about milage. That is the compelling instinct that seems to have propelled us forward. Except that it isn't a new thing. You can watch a hundred billion new things, and you were only ever doing a single thing the whole time: watching. Here's the distinction between doing something new and simply imagining it, or having it on your mind. Now I hope to day that all the social media is natural as well. I'm sure many creatures have spent a majority of their lives daydreaming or such, in tight spaces where no novelty seemed possible to them physically.

And that's how it can feel while doing something. Perhaps I am digging too deep into this, after all, my first instinct was that the situation is simpler than it seems, but I'm sure I'm missing something. One thing I do know for sure: creative work is deeply satisfying. I had hoped and dreamed of creating these wonderful things from my visions. A story, a book, a philosophy and way of life. A chiseled body, and beautiful art. An immense body of rich knowledge, that connects dots accross various disciplins and ways of life, as a means to connect people and share with them some valuable insights to improve their lives. These are the things I'm working to create. 

These other things that distract me, seem to be bad habits that are counter productive. Each time I play a game rather than read a book, pick up my phone instead of doing the work, and chat with people instead of writing, feels like a betrayal of sorts. To truly create something new and escape the deadly cycle of repetition, some drastic measures might be required. Yet, negative momentum cannot be forced into the positive. Instead, each time I feel myself slipping, I must try to breathe and stand my ground. With time I will learn better ways that help me taste the truly new and unique things I crave on a deeper level. To end things on a lighter note, it seems that this daily writing thing is definitely paying off. The more I come here to bang my head against a blank piece of paper, the deeper I dive into something or the other.

Every day, I can feel myself building the muscles, both big and strong, literally and metaphorically. As I am attempting to make a dent on massive concepts that I adore, trying to wrap my head around things and putting them into words, I am becoming aware of and facing newer challenges each time. These new problems scream progress to my eyes. I'm surprised to feel excited instead of discouraged that I'm able to find more roadblocks than revelations. That's how I know I am making real progress. To venture into lands unknown, where no man has gone before, that is the truest sense of being alive.