On Being Halfway

Day 26

“afraid of being seen”

-V


small things can mean a lot. Words half heard uttered by someone that I don't really know, not directed to me. A sentence I don't remember, about an event I can barely recall. Like trying to grab mist with your hands.


But it reminds me of me. Its an articulation of something that I too have thought and felt. Uttered by a child, a peer, and elder, what does it matter? Does the person who says the word change how we think of it? If the words were said by somebody else, would the meaning that we have from them change?


Either way I'm tired. I'm more tired than you can imagine, beyond the memory of rest. A tightness in the chest and a weight upon the breast, like atlas holding the world up, like somebody pushing the boulder up the hill. Push hard enough and the boulder flies upward for half a breath, running off your shoulders before coming back down harder. Damned if I do, damned if I don't, what do I want to do?


Other words I have heard, other feelings and ideas that showed me myself, or whispered to me of something which was a little more real than what I saw and felt, a sound that died on the lips of the past and never reached the winds of the future. A nothing and yet a something, a gem that reaches everywhere yet one I can't see clearly. We can connect to all that we hear and have, and yet be far enough away that we can't touch it.


How afraid can you be? How much can you open up? How many masks can you wear? Sometimes it seems that I can only say what I really mean when I talk to myself. Am I a coward and afraid, in a world I never made? To an extent. I have limits too – but so does the world. At least I have to think so If I didn't, I would drown. Drown – but it wouldn't be me drowning, it would be someone else. Someone else, something else, does this make sense? I know people can be vicious and mean, can be pretty and sure of themselves. People want to help – but sometimes that help is harm. Sometimes I do feel that we need to be self-reliant, self-reliant in such a way that any help is a harm. Or rather, any intended help, any help that pushes. We are fighting against the world, against ourselves and more.


I'm coming to the end of my first month here in Finland. I have had, maybe, two ten-minute conversations with somebody the entire time I've been here. I haven't talked much, or even left the apartment much. Why? I'm tired. I found out a long time ago that I can either do philosophy, I can either think – or I can talk to people. I can of course do both at once, but I can't be excellent at both at once. If 'excellence' is something I can reach, that is. Perhaps my meanderings are endless, perhaps I

am lost in a maze of my own head and I only think that this a way out. Perhaps I have said nothing that hasn't been said before, and will be heard by nobody. I don't know – I'll never be sure either way Ii think, not enough to deal with any doubt in my heart. The heart rules the head, and so my intelligence that I'm dong something – that only goes so far.


So if I'm damned if I do, and damned if I don't, then what should I do? Perhaps not acting is at least less of a trial, less of a spending of energy, leading to a lesser pain. Perhaps acting a way out, or its only a way deeper. There is an old story of Buddhism about Buddha sitting beneath the bodhi tree, when a being called Mara comes up to him and and taunts him. Offering him all the riches of the world and all the powers of princes. Mara was, as I recall, an illusion of the world, the illusion of personal wealth and power, of physical pleasure and endless death. Buddha touches the earth and tosses Mara away, then achieves nirvana. If I believe everything, then I believe in Mara – Mara exists. If Mara is something that exists, if the illusion of the world is something that exists – then what is it? Does Mara have some sort of Buddha nature, some part of Mara that also escapes the world? If Mara is effected by the earth, then Mara is attached to the earth. If Mara is seen by the Buddha, then Mara is attached to Buddha. If Mara is an illusion, if a mental figment of the imagination of the Buddha as a person, the part of us that whispers that buying one more thing or knowing one more fact will make us happy, then that still doesn't answer my question. At the end of the day its the same one as always – why is there something instead of nothing? Don't tell me how – tell me why. I want to know why, I why to want.


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