Yawp

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” 
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut is my Shakespeare. I think it will be decades, if not centuries, before we fully explore his wit, nuances and subtleties to a point where we can honestly say we understand him. He was a rare man, who could be savage, visceral and yet gently humorous at the same time, and I am absolutely fascinated by him. He never shied away from the messiness that was the human experience, but rather embraced it, making literary mud pies that haunted my dreams for years.

He also might have been on to more than we yet realize...

This quote of his always strikes me as one of his best, and I wonder if he realized how much quantum physics backed up this statement. He probably did, and he also probably didn't give a shit.

No, I don't want to get into the philosophical quagmire that is the question, "What is real?" You couldn't pay me enough to get into that, and there are MUCH more intelligent people than me that have braved it and drowned. Like a nautilus shell, it simply spirals down until your brain becomes jelly and slowly oozes out your ear.

That being said, I don't think we're meant to understand the full concept of reality, at least not at this time. As physical beings, we are limited by meat, by organs, by viscous fluids and neural synapes - computers can only work as well as their components, and our components are not cutting edge, by any means. Is being a physical being an amazing, enlightening journey? Absolutely. But are we any further along to understanding our world than we were when we played peek-a-boo as a kid? Not at all.

Motherfucker, how the hell did you do that? 

So if this is the case, why do we focus on it so much? The unknown has fascinated us since we were able to bipedal our way across the Olduvai Gorge just to see what was going on over there. We are obsessed with learning 'what it all means' and what's around the next corner, that the concept of who we are now completely eludes us. There are a million books out there on how to be mindful and the benefits of such. I don't think anyone questions that being in the present moment would alleviate a lot of the stupid shit we get ourselves into when leaving our brains to their own devices. So why is it so hard for us? Why does the steady march of time, which is only a basic concept that we've created so we can submit our billable hours, need to be faster, better, stronger? Whatever happened to massaging the moment, milking it for all we can before moving on to the next experience? 

I think we're so far ahead of ourselves that our asses are moving faster than our heads. This concept comes up a lot in things like ethics and superhero movies.

We can, but Christ on a cracker, why??

The dramatic increase in anxiety, depression and general unhappiness in the world is directly related to this increase in reality, I think. We don't like to be alone with our thoughts. We leave the TV on for background noise, we play mindless games online, we do anything and everything to 'keep busy' rather than stopping to ask ourselves "Am I ok?" If we did, we're realize that we aren't, not by a long shot. And I hate to tell you this, but we're not supposed to be. We are lazy, complacent motherfuckers, and the only way we progress forward is by necessity. We will delay personal transformation until the last possible freaking moment and some people have even been known to prefer death to getting off their arses and making the changes that are needed to move forward. 

We've gotten into our heads that faster, bigger, and easier is better, but it's all distraction. We've gotten so high up on our technological advances that we've stopped trying to be better people. We have no idea how to connect to each other anymore. We spend more time pretending we are who want to be, and ignoring the awesomeness of who we actually are. How the hell is anyone supposed to know us, to connect with us when we can't even connect to ourselves?

We've relegated the important areas - arts, philosophy, kindness, silence - to soundbites we put on our Facebook walls against pictures of trees/oceans/skies, bury it in cat memes and then argue about how much we disagree with things other people are doing that have zero bearing on our own lives.

"Pick a fight elsewhere, asshole, we control the interwebs."

I invite every one of you to spend 20 minutes with your own thoughts. No music, no tv, no computer. Try to remember what you were like as a kid and think with that brain again. Reconnect to the time where you thought your bicycle was the coolest thing ever, when that Jem lunch box completed you, when the X-Men cartoon was the shit. When going to a park and running around like a maniac in your underwear was a perfect day. When getting licked on the face by your dog wasn't gross, it was awesome. When being held by your parent/grandparent/caregiver meant absolute peace.

Now think about your day today. What would it have been like to go through your day with the mindset of that kid? How much richer would your life and what you contribute to the world be, if you brought that mindset to your day-to-day tasks? 

Life is messy. We're not here to figure it out. If entropy has taught us anything, it's that neatly organized chaos is a waste of time. We're here to be passionate. We're here to fart and poop and run until our lungs explode. We're here to laugh, to cry, to scream. We're here to experience so much emotion that it feels like our skin will fly off if we can't release it into the universe. To sound our barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world (yes, I know that's Whitman, not Vonnegut, now stfu). I'm talking about embracing the world with no regrets, no expectations and no illusions. Be the person you want to be, and your world will become what you want it to be. Reality is an illusion, the only real thing is your thoughts, and the world you create with them. That is literally it. Craft your world into the snowglobe of your dreams, and let your heart take flight.

... Yawp.