Pushing Against Boundaries

Fly fly
Away from here please
You're not wanted
Not here

Here is where we work
Where we laugh on breaks
We don't play where we work
That's silly, and a bit boring don't you think?

You just want to take
Take take take
Never giving back
To the creators

I'm dying to know
What it feels like
To never know
But always yearn

Really, it seems swell
Daily pain
Instead of
Daily gain

No, not here
Not with me and my lions
We don't long for anything
It's ours, or it will be

We don't fear the in between
In fact, that's what we live for
Reminding ourselves
We're still here at the edge

We tip the scales
Of possibility
The only questions left
Is how much better we can get

In our lifetime
The only thing left
After dominating your kind
Is to teach our young likewise

So fly away from here
We will not follow
We cannot hear your chatter
From the edges of existence

Roadside Poems in the Act

Dare to feel.   Dare to feel today.

Feel yesterday in today

When today feels too hard, know today too will pass

When today feels amazing, breathe it in, honour it as it becomes a happy yesterday.

Feel tomorrow in today.

80s Child

It's the 80s again. Can't you see it? Another decade of bad music, fashion motivated by the gaudy, overt drug influence, big hair and fitness obsession, economic decline, an undefined youth waiting haplessly for the next cultural or technological revolution to free them from certain misery.

The only love songs are love lost.  All of art is pain, suffering or escapism. Life imitates art and so do corporations. Every corporation profits from our dissatisfaction, so ask yourself urbanite, how many times you've used the phrase 'the world' in a positive light. No, the economy is fueled by hipsters, and so are the airwaves.

Science is commoditized - get me more terabytes, faster, wherever I am. We beg for more info, but less content.  Your next favourite, lifechanging book is a smaller file than this week's #1 single, but have you made any room for it on your phone, tablet, laptop, weekly schedule, brainspace? Or did you use that bandwidth to power through that old TV series you knew wasn't all that great which is why you never made the time to watch it live in the first place. And we were born in that generation, we are 80s children. When we loved tv, we found the time to sit at the alter of entertainment because it was precious.

What's precious anymore? Do you fill up your weekends or use them? You ask yourself, and maybe even tell yourself, casually, what you would do with more time. But you already have it. Today! Everyday! Would you tell yourself what you would do with a million dollars if you had a million dollars? Don't blame the high-fructose diet, you insulated yourself.  It's easier to have a million dollars and tell yourself what you would do if you just had a billion dollars, than to make use of the million.  Well life is a lottery you've already won, of about 2.5 billion minutes. Enough time to go out there and prove the hipsters wrong and change two lives for the better - yours and someone else. 'The World' is on the buddy system, and if we all help 2 people today, things can be better before this decade ends.

2014 is possible

Possibility is described as a realm, and I'm a bit taken back by the accuracy of that descriptor - realm.  Don't you think of the universe when you think of the world realm?  All of the matter and anti-matter, or perhaps matter and energy, or matter and space, or us and God, the living and the eternal, or whatever duality serves you best?  Why not approach the realm of possibility the same way.

So focused on the impossible, but does that ever get us anywhere?  Depression, lamentation, struggle.  But we don't approach any other realms this way do we?  We're not searching through space to find out how vastly empty it is.  We're looking for one, just one, other planet like ours.  So in the realm that is made up of the duality of possible versus impossible why do we suffer the impossible? Why do I?  Why work so hard to be convinced that something is possible only after thoroughly understanding that it can't be impossible?  Imagine sniffing around the outer atmospheric layer, scanning from pole to pole, to determine that indeed, there is no space here, this is a planet.  In fact, funny thing about space, we never seem to consider it at all until we're running out of it.

So I'm approaching life differently this year.  In the realm of possible versus impossible, I am no longer trying to remove the impossible.  Most realms are zero-sum, so I'm going to test if this one is.  To decrease the impossible, simply increase the possible.  There are things that I just can't find the time in a week (or month or year) to do.  Now, I do a little bit of it every day.  Every single day.  They say, or someone said at least, that what you do everyday matters infinitely more than what you do some of the time.  I think the math is simple there; do something 365 times for even 10 minutes, and you will have done it for, 60 hours.  And did it take longer than 60 hours for you to learn how to ride a bike, drive a car, learn to write, converse plainly in a new language, play your first scale on the piano, lose 5 pounds, read a life changing book, allow yourself to fall for that person?   And this is just the beginning. 10 minutes a day.  Why, I could dedicate one hour a day to 6 things, and put in my 60 hours each, and at the end of the year have 6 new basic literacies.  A pretty good start for novelties.  That Outliers book says that you need to dedicate ten thousand hours to anything to become an expert at it.  But in the meantime, couldn't we dedicate one thousand hours to 10 things to become an amateur at it?  And when you are an amateur at 10 unique things, aren't you only then entitled to determine which one is for you?  To decrease the impossibility of finding out the thing that you want to do the most in life, increase the possibility of there being that thing.  Keep increasing the possibilities, keep doing new things, more new things, everyday. Every single day.  In fact, like space, don't concern yourself with the impossible until you're running out of it.  Until you're jam packed with possibilities and have a population problem, you are not entitled to concern yourself with the impossible.

And life doesn't need to be scattered as a result.  Matter finds a way of coming together as it should.  In time I predict I'll have three or four things that I dedicate an hour to each day, three or four things I can call myself a true novice at by the end of this year, and a dozen other things I put my 60 hours into so  that I'm left with a feeling of happiness to know that I've broadened my horizons, 12-fold.  Imagine each year telling yourself you learned how to do 12 new things.  20 minutes a day at 6 things, for half a year, and then a new 6 things staring in June.  All it takes is two hours.  Seems impossible though, doesn't it? Who has two hours?  I need time for all my bad habits!  Having trouble with bad habits, btw? Easy, don't pay their impossible removal any mind.  Want to decrease bad habits; increase good habits, and you'll simply not have time for the bad ones.

So this is my modus.  The above is how I think 2014 will differ from the years preceding, and why I think it is possible.

Nothing to say

I write my best when I have nothing to say. No point to prove, no theory to falsify.  All of that is quite boring, and it has made it harder for me to finish what I started years ago.  I lost sight of this but I can get back to it now.

There's a reason for this.  When I'm trying to prove something, I know I can never write something as pure and sublime as the underlying truth that makes it true in the first place.  All I really want, in my human endeavour towards truth, is to experience it and be able to describe it.  That's far less ambitious and far more palatable for an audience - a mere description of truths experienced rather than a nagging reminder that the truth is more than you think.

And this explains a lot about my motivations that I couldn't understand before.  Why I cringe at the idea of applying for my masters in philosophy, but remind myself bi-weekly that's what I want to do when I'm 40.  I don't really want to do that until I'm in touch with a deeper layer of life truth.  That's why I didn't go straight into that career.  That's why I wanted to write first and foremost.

Sensations require words, the rest of the universe does well enough with mathematics.

But there are no sensations without experience.  And I don't doubt that I have experienced the many fictions that swim in my head.  These feelings are not neurons.  But with these experiences of the mind that I embark to put in print over the next 2 months and onward, I need to give myself to them.  Certain experiences, perhaps all experiences that are a benefit, require your permission to truly affect you.  For the next little while, it's signal through the noise, as I give myself to my thoughts.