A man is sitting in his chair.
A man is sitting in silence.
5 minute readA man is sitting silently inside his home. His empty home. Children’s voices can be heard from the above apartment. Other than that, it’s just him and his mirror.
A man decides to do some exercise. Why not, after all. He has been on a winning streak, psychologically, for two or three weeks. He is feeling stronger, smarter, he is working toward his goals.
A man begins to move his body. Soon enough the first droplets of sweat appear on his forehead, his face slightly red and his breath speeding up. He is pleased. He is going somewhere, he has a meaning and some purpose maybe.
A man continues. He is stressing his body more, but he doesn’t care. He wears just a pair of shorts and his dark glasses. Meanwhile, he checks the mirror to adjust posture. He is freshly shaven - except for his moustache - and can see the evening light bouncing off his ribs, which are almost fully visible. He must go through this, he has a purpose. He is going to show, or rather achieve, small feats of silent courage each day. He is going to push through trouble, to get where he wants.
Then the mirror looks back at him.
First, his legs. Quite skinny and shaking, unable to master the needed strength. Then his hair, grown and messy, and his naked jaws. Does he look like a child?
Then the asymmetry of his body. Head too large, accompanied by a chest grassed with brown hairs in a silly way, making a circle around his belly. Oh, some fat is there too.
This body appears to be struggling to keep up. This body is too weak. This body is maybe too silly, looking like it looks and doing what it does. Almost disgusting, its shape and movements are pathetic, like that of ants going around helplessly after having lost their colony.
Some crucial seconds pass, and the body is not a body. It has transformed into a small caricature. That’s what it is. Unable to do anything of substantial difficulty, pushing helplessly though real or imaginative obstacles. He looks the body straight into the eyes.
Maybe behind them there is a brain competent enough, a mind to be proud of. His memories pass before him in a glimpse, everything he has done and thought, coming together in fancy shapes and bright colors, forming a story, a narrative - which he knows is false - attached to emotions. Emotions of all kinds, all of them building up to this moment. Building up to what he is now. He is what he has become due to his past.
He smirks a little. Who is he trying to fool? There is nothing special about this brain. Now matter how many errors he fixes, new ones keep appearing. After all, there are eight more billion monkeys out there thinking the same. About meaning and purpose and other fairy tales we tell ourselves, to avoid reality.
A reality which has faced him before. And he would glance back at it, wondering why he even has to. Maybe putting an end is better. Maybe he doesn’t like reality, whatever that is.
He. Silly word. Each day he wakes up, but no one can convince him that his thoughts are his. Or the memories. They change each second he breathes. As does his body, all of its chemical molecules being replaced after a definite amount of time passes.
Maybe he is just a photograph - a photograph of an ever changing piece of matter and that-stuff-which-is-not-matter. Maybe “he” is just a concept in his mind. But concepts are just creations of our minds, so how is he just a creation of his mind? That’s weird. A self-contained entity, or not an entity at all.
His inability to come up with a better explanation isn’t bothering him at all. That’s also what scientists do sometimes, like light: a particle and a wave at the same time. Why? Because that’s what it is.
What’s bothering him is that little emotion he is feeling right now. The image of that pathetic creature looking at him in the mirror. What is it even trying to do with its life?
It’s not disgust anymore, though. It’s anger. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care to think, to analyze, to make assumptions, to believe in something to convince himself into action (and then only falling apart when his beliefs are shattered). He doesn’t even want to know.
He just wants to change this little shit. To look back at what he was each day, and be proud he isn’t that anymore. Even if that is just a construct of his mind. And he wants to live.
For the first time in a while, he wants to live. If anger is what’s fuelling him, it’s ok. On the other hand, it may be just a way to channel his extra energy into something, rather than nothing. Where does he get this extra energy from? He doesn’t know either. Probably from those pills he has been swallowing each day for 6 months or so. He doesn’t care to find out.
He just cares to live.
Souls can no more see the origins of their thought than they can see the backs of their heads or the insides of their entrails. And since souls cannot differentiate what they cannot see, there is a peculiar sense in which the soul cannot self-differentiate. So it is always, in a peculiar sense, the same time when they think, the same place where they think and the same individual who does the thinking. Like tipping a spiral on its side until only a circle can be seen, the passage of moments always remains now, the carnival of spaces always sojourns here, and the succession of people always becomes me. The truth is, if the soul could apprehend itself the way it apprehended the world - if it could apprehend its origins- it would see that there is no now, there is no here, and there is no me. In other words, it would realize that just as there is no circle, there is no soul. - MEMGOWA, CELESTIAL APHORISMS