Jun 2013
Do you ever think of the world?
On a larger scale than Charlton, Massachusetts, I mean.
Larger than our lives. Larger than our country. Larger, even, than our time.
Do you ever think of all of it?
Try it. Try, for a second.
How does it feel? To look back on and forward to and in and around and about everything?
Your mind can’t always hold it all, as it is.
Thinking of everything, even for a second, forces you to expand, change.
There’s this sadness to it, almost a tangible thing,
That settles in the air around you like dust caught in a shaft of bright sunlight.
It’s like someone’s thrown the curtains open on your darkened mind.
It feels odd, doesn’t it? To see it all from such a detached perspective.
Or perhaps not detached at all. Perhaps it’s the most personal thing you’ve ever thought of,
The deepest into yourself you’ve ever looked.
You live, think-speak-cry-breathe-walk-love-want, all the time.
Have you ever stopped to think about it? Have you ever considered the place in which you exist?
The people around you, the people who do the same, in such different ways,
Who don’t notice what you didn’t notice until I just asked you to think of it.
Do you ever feel it all? Dare to open your mind and let the world rush in?
Have you ever watched a sad movie and cried, but realized that you were crying over something much larger and much sadder than you thought?
Have you ever tasted empathy on a global scale?
On an impossible, ancient, mindshattering scale?
Dipped a toe into what it feels like to live outside of yourself?
WAY outside.
So far away from you and your own limitations that it’s as if you don’t exist.
I believe that we are everything our minds can hold.
Everything we can conceive of and understand, we ARE.
That is the beauty of being human- there’s no end to how vast you can be if you decide to.
If you fling open the doors to your mind, there will be no difference between you
And everything.
That is the feeling it is so impossible to describe, that I feel so very often without a word to name it.
It is the want, the need, the hunger to BE everything.
To mix and meld with the world and everything in it.
To blur the edges of myself until there are no edges.
That is what I want, and you want it too, we all do,
It is a human feeling,
Perhaps THE human feeling.
The mysterious difference that separates us from every other creature that exists.
We want to know everything.
Not just to analyze it, but to take it into ourselves on a deeper level than emotion or science.
Something primal tells us that we must learn-
Not in order to survive, not to exist and procreate, but to live.
It is something that, over the years of technology and reality tv, has lost its name, its word.
But it has never lost its potency.
It lives in all of us, even when we deny it.
A craving to be connected to every little thing in the entire universe.
Not to possess it all,
But to touch it and have it touch us.
To change it and be changed by it.
I think that maybe this feeling is what makes us special as a race.
Let’s not lose it to mundane lives and comforting inertia.
On a larger scale than Charlton, Massachusetts, I mean.
Larger than our lives. Larger than our country. Larger, even, than our time.
Do you ever think of all of it?
Try it. Try, for a second.
How does it feel? To look back on and forward to and in and around and about everything?
Your mind can’t always hold it all, as it is.
Thinking of everything, even for a second, forces you to expand, change.
There’s this sadness to it, almost a tangible thing,
That settles in the air around you like dust caught in a shaft of bright sunlight.
It’s like someone’s thrown the curtains open on your darkened mind.
It feels odd, doesn’t it? To see it all from such a detached perspective.
Or perhaps not detached at all. Perhaps it’s the most personal thing you’ve ever thought of,
The deepest into yourself you’ve ever looked.
You live, think-speak-cry-breathe-walk-love-want, all the time.
Have you ever stopped to think about it? Have you ever considered the place in which you exist?
The people around you, the people who do the same, in such different ways,
Who don’t notice what you didn’t notice until I just asked you to think of it.
Do you ever feel it all? Dare to open your mind and let the world rush in?
Have you ever watched a sad movie and cried, but realized that you were crying over something much larger and much sadder than you thought?
Have you ever tasted empathy on a global scale?
On an impossible, ancient, mindshattering scale?
Dipped a toe into what it feels like to live outside of yourself?
WAY outside.
So far away from you and your own limitations that it’s as if you don’t exist.
I believe that we are everything our minds can hold.
Everything we can conceive of and understand, we ARE.
That is the beauty of being human- there’s no end to how vast you can be if you decide to.
If you fling open the doors to your mind, there will be no difference between you
And everything.
That is the feeling it is so impossible to describe, that I feel so very often without a word to name it.
It is the want, the need, the hunger to BE everything.
To mix and meld with the world and everything in it.
To blur the edges of myself until there are no edges.
That is what I want, and you want it too, we all do,
It is a human feeling,
Perhaps THE human feeling.
The mysterious difference that separates us from every other creature that exists.
We want to know everything.
Not just to analyze it, but to take it into ourselves on a deeper level than emotion or science.
Something primal tells us that we must learn-
Not in order to survive, not to exist and procreate, but to live.
It is something that, over the years of technology and reality tv, has lost its name, its word.
But it has never lost its potency.
It lives in all of us, even when we deny it.
A craving to be connected to every little thing in the entire universe.
Not to possess it all,
But to touch it and have it touch us.
To change it and be changed by it.
I think that maybe this feeling is what makes us special as a race.
Let’s not lose it to mundane lives and comforting inertia.
