For most my life I’ve let myself be afflicted with nonsense and ethical questions and swallowed my spite whole into what is the memory complex of today.
And I thought I was doomed. That I suffered some horrible karma from a past life. Hand me lemons and I’ll squirt them in my eye. And yet I knew this wasn’t uncommon thinking necessarily. Not at all. Go ahead and plug around and find everyone frothing.
Still, I thought their frothing to be of a Wendy’s Frosty: anesthetized but stirring around for a moment before turning off and on the television for more. When I poked over their shoulder watching the game I couldn’t help but bear witness to this horrible situation and now I’m condemned.
Of course, this is completely blinded, low-brow thinking. Misguided too. But I couldn’t see it — I show my lurching darkness to drive this point home.
For recently I came across an amusing anecdote, which I’ll paraphrase below from with some fictional staging but the conclusions stay true.
Just as a fun experiment, we took about 150 undergraduates, sat each of them down in a big room, and set forth one rule: you just have to sit there and be still, be at peace with your own thoughts. For an hour. No devices or any such sort — no small talk neither. We saw a couple of eye-rolls, which is to be expected. They thought it not too difficult.
So we commenced the clock. And we found it far worse than expected.
After twelve to fifteen minutes, for each person sitting in that room, silent in their thoughts — after twelve to fifteen minutes, they were in excruciating pain. They couldn’t handle it.
We thought maybe it was just due to their social strata, undergraduates with their future to bear. So we thought to try it out on the workforce out there today, locals from the town.
The same thing happened. Unhappy to sit there with their thoughts they were.
As a final test we decided to gather more undergraduates and hook them up with a bracelet that goes to an anklet which’ll shock them if pressed. A painful shock at that. We thought that maybe, if they found themselves too carried away in their thoughts, we shall give them the opportunity for stimulus by letting them shock themselves. Surely they wouldn’t…
Yet they did.
Sit and stew, sit and stew; all of you claim to be mentally sound! I doubt that very much now.
Everyone’s neurotic. And they’re looking to get their next stimulus, or sink into their internal wars, or daydream about the future and past transgressions, and indulge in more Frosty’s to-go. Let life pass as they plan up another one. Not present! Not present!
The reality is that, thus far, I may have spent more time alone and so I was just more familiar with the excruciating pain. But this isn’t something to be proud about: to walk on hot coals more than most instead of figuring out how to cool them or not walk at all.
It’s just amusing. It seems obvious in retrospect, but I really did (pathetically) believe some were ignorant in bliss; how I couldn’t be more wrong! Everyone is chewing on something and deeply troubled. Their level of trouble is determined by how active they are in seeking escapes. So those that seem blissful just haven’t been hit by the fat truck coming their way in about two years time. Or they’ll be so busy looking around until they see the cavity in their chest.
But that’s quite hard. So for today I’ll go grab some food and leave you with a video.