I haven’t written on this platform in a while. I was going to mention why, but, it doesn’t really matter why, does it? Do people really even care about someone’s excuses?
We feel a certain need to justify ourselves to others, to assure them that everything is fine.
What’s the point? The other person doesn’t really care, and the ones who do care already sort of get it. The fact of the matter is the thing wasn’t done. The action wasn’t taken. Doesn’t matter why, doesn’t matter how, sometimes shit just doesn’t get done.
It’s the human condition. It’s to be expected. We’re a severely limited mortal organism bound by myriad rules and conditions forced to contend with powers magnitudes beyond us.
Our will is bound up in a hundred thousand different thoughts each day, pushed and pulled and twisted and turned in the currents of life and simply getting your head above water long enough to remember what you were supposed to be doing here in the first place is an achievement on its own.
Even the greatest among us, the most legendary. The war generals, orators, authors, speakers, activists, poets, sages, saints are subject to the same flux. The cosmic swirl of samsara has us all in her grasp and she does not let go. You can’t fight against her, you must simply take her hand and dance.
That’s the art to life… the ability to go with it. Take what you’re given let it marinate in your being and then transmute it back out into the world in a given form. You do your best, and let the pieces fall where they may. That person might never respect you, that other person might think you’re a dickhead, you ruined your opportunity with that guy, you look like a douchebag to this girl. It doesn’t matter, you take it, you move on.
People ask why I write a lot. There’s no good answer, because there is no answer. Or, rather, the answer is the same every time for everything anyone does. Because I want to. It’s so simple it doesn’t really feel like an answer. Because everything has to be for a reason, right? It has to have a utility to it that in some how way shape or form contributes to an extended framework to which we all must lay our gifts. Or so it seems.
Writing is energising, it’s cathartic, it’s pleasurable, it’s difficult, it is sometimes like drawing poison from a wound and sometimes it’s like banging your head against a fucking wall until some words fall out. It’s also everything in between, and all those various sensations have their place.
We consider ourselves to be free, to be the arbiters of our own actions and the choosers of our choices, when really we just are what we are and the interface between the conglomerate of disparate parts that we call ourselves rubs up against the greater ocean of reality and fate takes care of the rest. An impossibly elaborate, beautiful and utterly ineffable mathematical equation playing out in real time in a kind of harmony that we simply cannot understand from the material mind.
Hence I write. When I write, I’m not doing a whole lot of thinking. I’m sitting in front of a blank page and then my fingers start moving and before you know it words are being spewed out. Words I didn’t even know I was going to write. I had no idea where this was going when I opened the page and slapped a simple title in the header to get things going. I felt an impulse, knew something was coming and then I started moving. Kind of like taking a shit, I guess. Maybe I like to write more when I’m constipated. I don’t know, maybe, I’ll have to journal about it.
But that’s writing. It’s living on the knife’s edge, it’s present moment awareness. Creation in action, a small, orderly kind of creation using language as a brush. Language in the form of words, language that only the person reading it with the same thoughts, the same intuitions and a decent reading comprehension will understand. That makes it special. If they get it, they get it, and when two people get it that shared sense of existence is sometimes all you need to get across the line. To remember you’re part of the great big whole and not some isolated little entity with the world on its shoulders and knives at its throat.
It’s honest. I just write and the truth comes out. If I bullshit the page then the writing dries up like someone turned off the tap. Drip, drip, drip. Honesty is refreshing. We live in a world full of bullshit. Everywhere you turn, some more bullshit invariably manifests itself into your field of view.
People put up a front. A character. A kind of effigy that requires constant maintenance in order to stand up to the scrutiny of the crowd. But the crowd doesn’t really care. In fact, even when they care they don’t really care. Ever see a stupid comment on on the internet and wonder why that person is so fucking dumb? Maybe someone insults you online or makes a joke about your appearance. What you fail to remember is that person was just scrolling on their phone with their mouth hanging open on the train or in the lunchroom, tapped a few buttons and then immediately moved on with their day like nothing happened.
They don’t give a shit. So why do you? Perhaps you give a little less of a shit than you used to. It’s a seasonal thing. You go through phases, yet slowly but surely you relinquish all the nonsense in your life and become freer and freer to honestly express yourself with no holding back. No lag. No loading screens, no sleights of hand, just raw unmitigated data from the creature that is YOU.
Cause you *are* you. There’s no escaping that. You don’t know why and you’re not sure exactly what you’re doing here but the fact of the matter is you’re stuck with you. So if you can learn to get out of your own way and be whatever you’re supposed to be, rather than collapse into an apathetic pile devoid of meaning, you’ll quickly realize that you’re now ready to go on and go ahead and do what the fuck you wanted to do from the start.
Nathan's Writing 