June 29, 2008

• ramblings

  Just some random ramblings today. No need for you to comment, read, or acknowledge the existence of this entry in any way. It won’t make much sense anyway.

  So today I finally got a lot of the missing data I’ve been looking for. You see I’d been having this really bad feeling for quite a while now. And at the heart of it, I thought, was this sense of missing information. I thought there was something really bad I didn’t know about or something really bad that was going to happen as a result of my ignorance.  I felt like I needed more data. The situation just wasn’t making any sense to me. My instincts were screaming at me that something was very wrong.

  Turns out for once in a blue moon my instincts weren’t wholly off. There was a lot I suspected but didn’t know that turned out to be dead on exactly as I suspected. And just as bad as I suspected. But it seems like things are going to be ok now, which is good. In fact for me personally they might turn out to be even better than ok. Or maybe not. I don’t know, but it’s clear that my life might end up getting a lot more complicated. But not, I think, in a bad way. I think I could learn from it and help someone at the same time. And if it doesn’t turn out that way, I think I’ll still have learned a great deal and have gotten a chance, I hope, to meet a new and interesting person. I’m really happy that things are turning out alright. That a lot of things that have been bothering me are getting settled and all falling into place.

  So…

  Why is it that I still have this really bad feeling?

  I’m not sure. Maybe it’s something else wholly unrelated to the last feeling. Something else that just doesn’t seem right in my environment. Details I’m missing. A lack of data from which I can derive a sound judgment. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who hates not knowing as much as I do. Anticipation drives me nutts. I need my data. I have to be ble to draw logical deductions or else I start to get unsettled. And I start to worry. I worry way waay too much in fact.

  I wonder if a bad feeling isn’t naturally a self fulfilling prophecy right? It’ll just stick around up until the point where something bad happens and then you’ll just say “See! Guess my bad feeling was correct.” But of course that’s a clear falacy since bad things will eventually happen to everyone almost guaranteed and when it does, guess what, you’re always going to think your bad feeling was correct!

  But I guess I’m not so much of a logician as all that deep down because I tend to trust my instincts and my feelings and my suspicions. I act upon them even long before they are confirmed. This often leads me to make mistakes. But every once in a while it enables me to be prepared for the things that do happen. I don’t get blindsided very often. It seems like most possible outcomes and possible explanations I’ve already considered and taken into account. If my instincts are telling me that something might turn out one way, then I prepare for the possibility of that happening while still being prepared for the possibility of my being dead wrong.

  Even worrying about weird feelings and odd suspicions aren’t the thoughts that preoccupy most of my time spent staring into nothing though. Rather then my mind wanders most to imagining the possibilities.

  I keep wondering, how would things have been different if things had changed just a little bit. A few small alterations in variables? What if we changed the time frame by just a couple of months or a couple of weeks? What if I had written things just a little different, had never sent that letter or never written those words, or never reached out to that person, or had chosen to reach out to that other person? What if I had stayed there a little longer, or left there way sooner, or what if I had never gone to that other place in the first place? Would it have been different? Better? Would I have been able to help the same people? Would I have been able to help them even more? Or help others? And what would have happened to them if I couldn’t have helped? What kind of life would I be leading now if I’d made all the easy obvious choices? Done all the right things? Would I be leading an even simpler one than I have now? Or would I have run into complexities I couldn’t have imagined?

  And mostly I just can’t help but wonder about the far past… What if I had made different choices while growing up? Choices that would have lead me to be a better more capable more successful more…  well I don’t want to go down that line of thought any further than that.  And yet I wonder if I had made those choices growing up would I still be the same person I am now? The same free thinker? The same person who thrives on being unpredictably unique in a lot of ways. Or would I have conformed more in order to be more acceptable to others. And would that be such a bad thing? Does the world need people whose minds walk such strange paths as mine seem to wander day by day?

  But what if eh? I seem to be preoccupied with that damnable “if” word.  It seeps into all my writing. Strange.

  I don’t believe in God or religion of any kind really. I’m not very spiritual at all. I’ve written about that before. If there’s any word that applies to me, it’s that I’m agnostic, but even that doesn’t seem quite right. I really hope there is more to life than what there appears to be. I’m just not about to jump on *any* belief bandwagon just because I can. I need real reasons. Rational reasons. Ha! This is actually hte same reason I have very little school pride or national pride and why I find it so hard to get into sports and most kinds of fandoms in fact.

  But I do sort of think that maybe sometimes I do believe in Destiny and Fate. They’re different you know. Fate is the impending unrelenting outcome you want to avoid. Destiny is the impending future that fulfills an ends. Eh I’ve explained the difference much better in the past but the words are escaping me today. It’s late. And my mind is starting to wander to even weirder places now.  But I want to finish this thought before I stop writing. I sort of believe in Fate and Destiny because life sometimes seems sooo much like one big gigantic story. Like a crazy book someone out there is writing.  I used to imagine that that was exactly the case when I was a kid you know? As I read fantasy books I imagined that the authors were piped their stories through some weird transference medium. That they somehow had a window into other real worlds where these things were actually happening and they were just writing them in words as best they can. Their view of it might be fuzzy and they might not get the real stories exactly right. But the real storeis exist. And authors are just conduits.   That’s what I thought.

  And so I wonder also if maybe someone out there is writing our story. Not a God or anything but just some regularly joe taking our life’s events and putting them into a narrative. Making into an epic grand series of novels. Maybe there are hundreds of thousands of people writing our stories making a massive collection of books that together collectively represent all of the lives of people on this small blue planet. 

  And also, maybe those books are just reflections, shadows of some grander real story. The true incredible story of who we are that’s already written. Or maybe it’s just outlined with several possible branching outcomes where we can still make a different and shift the story. A choose your own adventure story but the basic events are already in there and can’t be avoided. You will meet certain people in your life and have a roll in their lives and accomplish certain things in your lifetime. That’s your destiny. You will face certain challenges and hardships. That’s your fate.   But how you react to these things. Maybe you have a choice. Maybe you can still screw up and maybe you can still succeed in ways you couldn’t imagine.  Maybe a single slightly different choice can make someone who was meant to be your close friend into a near stranger? Maybe a decision made here or there turns someone who would have been but your casual acquaintance into a life long companion or spouse. But the story proceeds the same either way. You can’t escape your fates or your destinies. Maybe you can’t. I think about that possibility all the time.

  But I’ll be damned if I’m going to ever really believe that either. Certain fates, I’ll fight against with my last dying breath. I’ll make them turn out differently. I don’t know if I can make them ideal, but I can at least do all I can to divurge the outcomes that I despise.  And I think I can do it too. I think we can all do it.  I guess in the end I don’t really believe in fate or destiny. If life’s a choose your own adventure book I think there are some blank pages in the back that we can sort of fill out however we please when we make choices that the author never intended.

  That’s enough rambling for today. I wish I had more data. I really hate this feeling of uncertainty. When I sleep with it I end up having the dumbest nightmares. Oh well. At least for now, everything seems fine and like it’ll work out ok. I just wish I really believed it.

  • 1:56 am
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