…Is the title of a book I have yet to read, but that I’d like to read when I finally get over the monumental beast that is Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, which in turn was a follow-up from Homi K Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, which I decided to read upon being inspired by Shahril Hamdan.

The words ring out to me today though, because they are a nice reminder that reality is a process that unfolds over time – whatever the temporality of that time apart from its objective and lived out experience, it is certainly an unfolding that I experience each minute and second; each of these seconds that I experience are my own, and I cannot experience that of another within the lives of other human beings, whom I can only surmise are as cognitively and texturally rich as my own to the extent that I conclude that others are, in fact, like me.

It is interesting for me to think about this because I am now recalling a conversation with someone who is now a Rhodes Scholar (congratulations! Ok a bit weird to congratulate via blog post sry bro but it just happened that way), who talked to me about solipsism as we ate RM350 hamburgers in a hotel that we had come to only after long walking and near death from starvation – there is a long conversation to be had about that and a story that may well be lost to time except in this brief reflection – but he effectively described to me the common realization we had that in fact, it was not really possible to disconfirm the possibility that everyone outside ourselves were actually just figments of our imagination – even each other.

I suspect he remembers this conversation, but I will do myself and the both of us the needed thing of not sharing names, haha.

Anyway, it is interesting to me to think about people who may abide by solipsistic ideals who may read this post and then think to themselves:”Oh, how interesting! These figments of imagination are so creative nowadays! The universe sure is coming up with some unique theater for me in this weird life game! Haha! Haha! HAHAHAHAHA!”

…Which gives you a small picture of how I think about people who hold this frame of reference.

Anyway, that was a nice little aside that completely sidesteps the reflection I was having earlier, which yields in its completion the following realization:

I (we) experience reality as a process unfolding – directing, being directed, images, reality, predicting, being predicted, with multiple knobs and timelines and impacts of causal shock in a dynamically propagating system whose initial conditions often have very little to do with the final results, but whose possibilities over which determine the entire lodespan of our observable qualia as we progress through time.

It has taken everything I have to resist using the word “diachronic” or to start going into terminologies that are useful only for telling myself I am very bright and I like understanding the deeper things, though, and I observe this to make a simple comment: It is easy to privilege yourself, to treat yourself as unique, special, a fragment of the Imperial cauldron, the Universe consciousness, a snowflake melting in cosmic rays and thus dying by cosmic significance.

Anyway, it is not really the purpose of this blog post to unpack all of reality – whether that is possible I don’t even know, but it will certainly not be done by someone who is here throwing out shower thoughts before going to the gym.

More soon.
Ciao.

I’m writing this in the middle of a somewhat sluggish feeling after waking up rather late in the morning. I’m also doing it after practicing the cello and reviewing my DJ skills, reflecting on everything I did the previous day. Throughout this entire process, my body and mind are kind of pulling me back, a small drag on my consciousness, saying, “Wouldn’t it be better not to be this thing now?”

It’s not a sharp feeling by any means, just the sense that “maybe we can rest” or something like that. Internally, though, there seems to be a little clock that is ticking forward regardless of the situation, and it is getting stronger with every waking moment. As the drumbeat goes from a pitter-patter into a steady march of forward thunder, I’ve always had a tenuous relationship with consistency.

I practice the things that I don’t necessarily want to do. My goal is multiplying, but my effort is not keeping pace. The effort stalls, my body and mind drag, and eventually, there’s a great giving up. The past few months have been quite different, though, and it’s hard exactly to say why. Perhaps it’s because I now see that the things we don’t want to do are often exactly the things we have to do, that we may become the people that others may not.

Or perhaps it is not realization, and instead, it is a process—forward-moving control, almost like a force of nature, but less like the wind and more like the great opening of the fissures of the earth along fault lines that had already existed. It is meaningful to be able to watch this and observe it, to gain a little bit more momentum each day in the search of the person I am becoming with each moment.

The reason I’m typing out this post now is because a system I created worked, and that is a fact worthy of celebration. It could have been otherwise, but it is not so.

Why?

Because today, at variance with other mornings, I sat down in the middle of boiling water for coffee, opened my laptop, and there it was – an autogenerated tab right on the posting page, where I could just casually start writing without any friction.

Didn’t even have to think about it – it was just there sitting in front of me, the keyboard was working, the tab was there – every single item was in place.

This reminds of a tried and true reflection I have had over the years – that so as all happy families are alike yet unhappy families are unalike in their own ways (as famously inverted by Peter Thiel), the “happy family” producing this little piece of writing is the concord of multiple blockers being removed, so as to make the task easier, more simple, more natural.

Speaking of “natural”, I suppose there’s a natural limit to this kind of thing – that at some point, to achieve greater ambitions, a person would have to lock in and take part in more advanced orchestration.

Yet, as we know, life is a holistic game made of multiple interlocking games – win or lose is never about any individual game.

But that doesn’t stop me from celebrating this particular win.

Happy Saturday, everyone!