Mine is forever"
Courtney Love.
We often think we are living unique moments and experiencing special events when we are at the peak of positive emotional reactions. It might be something we waited for so long to happen, or a situation we had been planning for years, months, days that suddenly comes to life. We are exhilaratingly taken by the instant, as we realise how much of our past selves we had dedicated to this present moment.
Where was my mind?
So where does the heightened sense of accomplishment comes from? Is it because of the time that was spent in waiting? Could it be because we did not quite believe things would unfold for our own benefit? Or was it that there were so many hidden variables to compute into this single output? Regardless, there is always the feeling of potential risk or loss in the gambling wheel of life. What we predict is often what we hope for, rather than what we really picture in our mind.
And it is true that in our head, there is a constant chaotic whirlpool of emotions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, ideas, memories, plans and perceptions. At one end, we can choose to relentlessly isolate some of its elements, but on the other end, we could go by total abandonment, allowing ourselves to get sucked into the traumatic drama. This is what we do when we are in the blues, waiting for the internal tempest to uncover a new way to make sense of the world. Depression indicates the limits of our mind in dealing with its own confusion.
Probably a maybe
So what gets us back on track? Nothing more but a game of probabilities: the lure of navigating the chessboard and turning ourselves from pawns to knights to queens. It is nothing more but mathematics applied to real-time digits and figures, though we all want to bet on the road that is the shortest to the King's castle. In this mental race, we wrongly believe we alone can see the way forward for ourselves. We ignore training and pattern recognition. We forget our mind is just a machine eager to learn...to death.
As a result, we have to dabble about in probabilisms most of the time: maybe we are going for the best, maybe we are staying for the better, the results can only be known after we have gone through all of this. And this is precisely what makes us feel stuck: changes are embedded in our lives and so are our attempts to override them. Who can say they have always had triumphs, without ever experiencing defeats? Only those who run away from themselves can afford such consequential lies and deceptions...
