Is It Long, Or Is It Wide?

Viewpoints. Pshaw. If you hold onto none, you avoid the pains of conflict, but toss your soul to the wind. On the other hand, being picky and holding only one invites stagnation and an anti-creative death.

Apparently, many of life's problems lie in holding conflicting viewpoints. Whether it's friction between you and he, or just as commonly in your own mental playground, the bitter battles absorb casualties on both sides until... Well, there is no possible endpoint. Only a point of redundancy. If it goes on long enough, you may be left digging in a sandbox filled with irritating pits and pillars of perfection, the ones that used to masquerade as harmless opinions. And you'll still be fighting over which one is more perfect.

To make your way out of the rough, you have to open yourself to a reality that has no need for interpretation.

As you accumulate experiences, memories cling to you and clamor for your attention. The mind in it's civilized state makes an object of understanding the past, the logical jump being that past actions inform your current ones, like eating asparagus, vomiting because it tastes bad and so remembering to never eat it again. To the mind, memories merit the same level of inspection whether they contain lessons or not. You know better, but your lens to the world depends on this method of investigation.

A life without a lens is only available once you suspend belief, in exchange for the truth of each moment as it hits.

The evidence, your memories, support all and any beliefs you choose to adapt to them. The evidence can be as malleable as it is stubborn, it exists on both sides of any argument. Physical evidence is everything it seems to be, and yet many will still try to break it down to support a single rule: One that exists in correlation, but rarely causation. In isolation, but not fluently in reality. That one rule then becomes a dummy burrow, a deep claustrophobic grave for solutions and clarity.

Science often falls victim to this, requiring replacement "rules" and theories to compensate.

Let go of all knowledge, and it gains ascendecy as something beyond knowledge, beyond knowing, beyond superficial reality. The skin comes off and the juice becomes all the planets' oceans, flowing together.

But thoughts will still nag and nag and nag. My memories cling to me as surely as gravity will eventually pull me through this seat, this floor... into the ground itself, myself, some day.

This cling I don't recognize as a bad thing, though. Considering myself, I can only smile at this game of "what is." I have moments of clarity, free from past or future thought, and I have muddy moments; but I realize I can hold onto neither along the spectrum. If your forceful aim is to be released through a perfectly pure and conscious existence, Irony will find it's golden opportunity, and you will drag yourself deeper into the muck.

So... It seems hopeless, but there is hope beyond understanding the conundrum. Settling into your time capsule called an imperfect life, moving ahead, will let both open and closed thoughts trail in your wake. There they'll find their natural place, as each argument in the pod loses and gains ground. Like dolphins tracking a ferry, they jockey for position. None are objectively right. They don't exist, objectively. The thoughts that are too heavy, too cumbersome, will eventually fall back, sinking to their anchored and static niche on the sea floor. And that is the end of their influence.

Paint is calling...