recover

November 22, 2019

when you have had to make big, adult life decisions, how have you known if you made the right choice

perhaps a better phrasing would have been: how have you known when you have made a mistake?

we think, now, that the judgment ex post facto is irrelevant; that what matters is making a choice at all

(you, we, me) made a plan, sketched the outlines, the paths ahead, and at some point - this point, now - you realise that it’s the wrong plan for the time. the plan is still solid (we hope); it’s true to me, from then; it’s true to who i want to be; and it gives back to the communities and networks that have supported me to this point.

i am an intensely private person, i struggle with people when i know them, and fear them when i don’t. i trust myself - and i trust myself enough to know that i am unworthy of trust. how could i be? i know enough to know that i know less than a fraction of nothing.

to modernise Socrates:

we know that we know nothing

i know that my perceptions are optimised for survival and convenience, not for truth. and if i don’t trust me, how can i trust you to trust me?

the plan we had made was a plan for me. it was where i wanted to be, what i wanted to become, who i wanted to be with; and of late, i don’t think any of that really matters.

it’s fine (mostly).

i like the idea of god the least. i cannot believe the lie, but i hope it brings you comfort; some small comfort, here.

i believe in the idea of an objective truth. i believe there is a reality common to you and i, though our sense may interact imperfectly with it. nothing that i have learned about human cognitive processing leads me to believe that the world, as it is constructed behind my eyes, is the world as it exists in front of them.

towards that end, or the start of that end, words have meanings: it’s what distinguishes words from sounds or music. it is how you can read this, once and if you manage to break out of the linguistic purgatory: the hollow realisation that word is the word for… a word. if you’re stuck, i would advise you not to think too long or much about what a dictionary is.

beyond that, words exist outside of intent. this point is oft spun to fit an argument that words have mo meaning - the “but i didn’t mean it that way, why are you offended?!” reverse apology. this is a particularly specious kind of logic: that because a word has one meaning, it can’t then have another (and certainly not more than one at a time). much to the contrary, by using a word you are accessing the collective understanding of it that exists beyond just yourself.

we were here, then, but now? ways away and adrift of where we set out…

what matters, then?

well; nothing

but because nothing matters, everything continues. the strangest part - to him, from us - was that the world kept going.

my reality, my values, were shattered - yet nothing stopped.

this is not new.

and to be truthful, neither is the revelation.