The feeling of meaninglessness that sometimes grips us, the absurdity behind the internal collapse of a “was it all for nothing?”, is the result of a flawed vision of reality, when it is perceived through a filter of strict linearity.
Time is understood here as a line along which we have established landmarks and developed a strategy. We have assumed that by passing through the gates we have entered, the desired outcome will necessarily follow.
When this doesn’t happen, our representation of the world appears invalid, and we experience a psychological collapse. Yet, this is a truncated and distorted representation of a reality over which we have learned to believe we have some control.
This belief stems from a profound ignorance of how we interpret the world.
If, on occasion, the unfolding of reality conforms to our plans, it is an eminently transient phenomenon, subject to other tectonic shifts in reality, shifts far more powerful than the small arrangements with which we have been able to construct the past.
Furthermore, the efficient calculation we employ when reality seems to favor us is often a retrospective construct that we like to attribute to the past in order to see in it some kind of force, a power, a hold over life, which ultimately aims to reassure us.
A truly serene being has no such pretensions. The decision we validate in the moment we experience these phenomena (the one that later leads us to believe we were right, that we planned everything perfectly) is the result of a spur of the moment pulled from the urgency of a pressing situation. Having no control over the future or the present, we distort our perception of the world in order to cling to the illusion of having control over the past.
Neither present nor future, but past,
the world is made of moments.
The rest is a matter of personal stories between us and ourselves.
Notes & Silence 