2025-01-18

Today is a day of resting. I needed a break from thinking. I was tired of it all. I noticed that I have been obsessively mulling over the morality of everything. Who gets to do things. Why people do what they do. Why do most artist turn out to be cowards. And why does creation should inherently carve a higher sense of moral responsibility to its creator. Those kinds of things. It felt like my line of thinking is only going in circles. I needed to catch myself. To stop. And somehow enjoy some hours away from my laptop.

Which is what I did and spent some time watching a movie and finish a series: both that actually stirred some existential questions: about ridding oneself of grief, of the extremes of forgiveness, and a tiny aspect of the reality of aging. Was my mind able to rest? I would say so, given that I haven't actually been processing all of these things. In my mind, the things I mentioned previously, are already on their way to crystallize into a semblance of an insight. Today has been a way to remove myself from the shadows of those thoughts and give myself some space to rid myself of familiarity. In a sense, it may look like all I have been doing is to always give myself something to think about. This is true. But this has been a recent deliberate exercise to finally figure out what I actually think about things. In the past few years, I have stopped myself from giving meaning to everything. Interpreting every detail, trying to look at it from various perspectives, dissecting every possible layers, and mumbling to myself "there should be more to this" after every attempt at a synthesis. But those were the times when academia and social media had a massive influence on me. What I "think" is always dictated by nitpicking every possible theory from a dead person to substantiate my claims. I can only provide a perspective by walking to the same line of thinking that people before me did.

It is not like I am now trying to attempt to be "original" because we all know it's already an impossibility. But I realized that I used to scour through articles, manifestos, passages from seminal works, and quotations from reputable people, is because I lack an experience of the world. I was young. A literature major graduate in his early twenties, trying to apply the map of theories to the real world he has now been casted into. The world then was framed by pages of texts as if Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation and Lacan's Seminars explain every human encounter. The irony is, when I thought I knew how the world works, I stopped thinking.

Every movie became a lesson about the world and the self. Every show on TV became a social commentary and I made a whole fiction out of the reality of everything. The world was my text and I was there to interpret everything. From my own bus commutes to every people I meet, what I know about them, what they like—I made sure that the world becomes predictable enough in a way that I can formulate a conclusion as to why things happen based on how they happen.

I was insufferable. Because I believed I speak the ineffable truth. And it came to a point when I realized that I've never had a single thought. I was only speaking through the language of the people whom I know to be telling the truth. This is going to be a story for another day.

But since then I have begun taking things less seriously. I shifted my perspective to be more open to what people say. And throughout these years, I have learned a lot from just being with the world. I took my time to analyze everything but only with deliberate action. It doesn't have to be my default mode. The analytical part of my brain has to rest or else it will get overworked and just grasp on the easiest ways of understanding because it has lacked the endurance to process complex layers of information.

I still enjoy watching films and even choose to watch some that I know are just something I can sit with and enjoy. The symbols can come later but for now, I am just absorbing these series of images flashing right before my eyes and just be.