nolan_void

I had a whole other profound post typed out earlier, but I accidentally hit something and flushed it all down the cyber-toilet. I was rather pissed, so in the midst of the computer lab I told the computer to go fuck itself and walked to the store to get batteries for my cd player. On this walk, I stumble across some even more profundity.

I started thinking about how the most constant and familiar experience with reality that human beings have is through themselves, through their own thoughts and feelings, and how this filter of reality shapes how we perceive everything we see and everything we project out into the world. This got me to thinking about the concept of ghosts. Specifically, the speech from the creepy little kid in The Sixth Sense came to mind, about how dead people walk around all the time without realizing that they are dead. That's when I realized that I am a ghost.

So here's the deal. You're probably dead too. If you are walking around lost in memories of a past that you no longer have the power to change, a slave of memories that you haunt like a spirit unable to leave, then you are a ghost. If you are waiting around for that one event or person to come about to complete your unfinished business so that you can finally rest in peace, you are a ghost. Dead. You are trying to grasp a past that you are now dead, a past that most likely colors your perception and obscures you from knowing the present which is all that is real. If you wake up every day with the weight of yesterday piling up on your shoulders, afraid to be alive because you are afraid it will be like some other bad experience that happened in a time that is well beyond your reach now, you might as well be a corpse and your bed might as well be a tomb. Fear not though. There is a solution.

Let go. Stop thinking about what you can't do about then, and start thinking about what you can do now. There have been so many nights when I wished I could go back and say the right thing to those people, to make it all right, to fix what I see as an imperfect past that has led me to an unsatisfactory present. But if I hadn't fucked up then, I wouldn't know that things could have been done better now. And as all of us dead people sitting around thinking about how it could have been, or what we could have done differently, we completely miss the world as it changes around us and forsake our power to be born again, to do something right fucking now.

Tomorrow morning when my alarm clock rings, instead of looking at the clock and reflexively resetting the alarm so that I can slip back into a painless unconsciousness, I am going to tear my way out of that goddamn grave and live no matter how much it might hurt. To be afraid is to live in the past, and to live is the past is to be dead.