Getting Another Person

Whoever likes questions left unanswered and explanations left hanging, we should definitely have a quick chat over cake and tea. I need your help.

There comes a [very rare] moment when you will just decide to stop figuring things out and asking why. And it will get you weak. For a while, you will think to yourself how poor a being you humans are, with all your limitations - those caused by virtue of your being human, and those you cause among yourselves. The latter type is more frustrating. It comes in the form of miscommunication, lack of consideration, or simply the inability to give a damn.

What's separating you from the information you want is this imaginary line that's just too broken it can't bridge the gap between what you demand and what the other person can supply. It's when it's hard to get your point across, when you're deliberately deprived of an explanation, or when the one you're talking to is indifferent to your dire need of that piece of information. Surely there'll be attempts to fix that line. You can clearly repeat what has been said, or even force an answer out, but the thing with limitation is that you are placed in a situation wherein your ways of dealing with it are themselves limited. The line is essentially broken. The least you can do is to minimize the spaces in between, but you won't be able to remove the discontinuity.

There will never be a smooth transfer or sharing of ideas between two minds. A falsifying instance may be proposed: an understanding between two people. Some would say that this understanding is validated in cases when people come to an agreement, but we can never fully "get" where Person B is entirely coming from, can we? We only get hold of the idea at surface level, but never the underlying presuppositions which caused the other person to arrive at his idea which you seemingly agree to. Apparently, the line remains as it is. Broken.

And one more thing. It's imaginary. The line does not exist. I can never make you understand what I have just written the way I would want you to receive my thoughts. We will never come from the same perspective, because no two people have exactly the same experiences. You don't have the experiences Person B has, so no matter how you think you both get each other, you in actuality don't. What's keeping us believing that we understand one another is our assumption that we indeed have reached an understanding. I'll assume you understood me, and from there we move on. :)

Acknowledgement of the fact that there are may information another person possesses which we can never know of is definitely a downer. However, one has to realize that sources are everywhere. If the source is solely one person, though, and impossibility of acquiring it is becoming clear, let it go. This is when you'll decide to stop figuring things out and asking why. Some things will never be made known to you. Acceptance of this will help you move even just a little bit forward. Eventually, you would come across plenty of a-little-bits, and after some time, without even noticing it, you'd have gone way far from where you are standing now.

But then again, these are easier said (or written) than done.

An Almost-Sembreak Phase

These are the times when I badly need an exceptional inspiration. Or pressure. Either of the two will work. I have three 20-paged papers to submit, and three final exams to review for. I have the time and the resources.

And a huge percentage of the hours that I am awake is spent on eating. The interval between my every meal is averaged at less than an hour. I eat whenever I see food. I look for food whenever I don't see one at the moment.

It's not that I might not get things done. That's the result of an underlying problem. I am more concerned with the implications of this conduct. What bothers me is that I am not bothered anymore.

Something's telling me that what I've been doing (or not doing) are intentional. Writing this blog instead of prepping for my papers, figuring out why this is happening to me instead of making reviewers for my exams, reading Gabriel Marcel's Mystery of Being instead of understanding Heidegger and Sartre. Maybe I'm just exhausted doing things the way I'm supposed to.

I just ran out of will to follow my schedule, to be faithful to my plans. Motivation through rewards won't work on me. It usually doesn't make a difference if I tell myself that I will get all the pampering I want after all of my tasks are done with, or that I will watch a movie if I finish a certain paperwork in a challenging span of time. Those barely get me motivated, for I don't look forward to them. I demand for them beforehand. That's why my concept of unwinding is not that it relieves me from the hassle. It serves to set the mood for me to get started.

The bigger problem is that the motivation that actually works for me is proving to be very elusive. I need a reason, and this time, not just of any sort. I require an ultimate reason, that which encompasses all my other endeavors. I need a justification that would warrant the rest of my actions, not the kind that fails to account for why I do other ordinary, seemingly menial, tasks. I know that to look for this is an extremely tall order. It might even be impossible to find it, or to realize that I have found it once I've found it.

This is burnout at its finest and at its most inappropriate timing. I cannot afford one right now.

Someone please remind me of the bigger picture. Thank you.

Mind-work

I always (not sometimes, not often, not mostly, but always) get this urge to write. However, along with this unrelenting desire to concretize my thoughts is this constant feeling that what I will be writing will never measure up to what is actually going on inside my head, regardless of the crucial and painstaking process of making sure that what I would write will completely capture my ideas, from the minutest detail to the largest picture, from the most superficial observation to the deepest realization. How many times have I caught myself thinking aloud about how I badly want a device that can automatically save the exact contents of my mind.

It strikes me as odd that in most cases, though, my ideas come in the most bizarre forms. I hear them as unintelligible swooshing sounds, but not with my ears. Or I see them as flashes of lines and colors, but not with these poor eyes. It's crazy. What's sure is that I understand them (weirdly enough), but they don't make it easy for me to make them understandable to others. They seldom come in words, for crying out loud. I have this theory that they are pouring in way too fast to the point that my brain gives up on trying to box them in the realm of language. It's like a stampede. You don't give out name tags to people in a stampede.

I can't sustain a thought long enough to give me time to find a pen and a paper, or to open Evernote, or to Compose a Message, so that I may jot it down. That's because it gets replaced by yet another fresh (or maybe just a persistent) topic. It would be tolerable if the replacement takes place in a linear manner, but no. There is overriding, clashing, overlapping, and disjunct of ideas all in the same head, all at the same time. It's safe to say that the most chaotic place in the world for me is my head. 


It gets tiring - a working mind. The worst thing is that one cannot bring about the cessation of the process. It continues as long as one is awake. 



The irony is that the process is what keeps me from sleeping.