February 17, 2022
My little pinky toe is just about done with me. He told me that he doesn’t want to be a part of my body any longer. I told him that I understood, but that I would never forget him for as long as I lived. He would always have a spot on my foot if he decided to return.
He went ahead and removed himself. He said his goodbyes and then left via the front door. All the components of my body wept and mourned the loss of our pinky toe.
Writing Class
It can be interesting to occasionally stop and observe life and try to figure out how it works. Whenever I look around, I tend to get the feeling that everything is perfectly simple and impossibly complex all at the same time. It sorta reminds me of a laptop designed by Apple. At first glance it looks so simple, but peek under the hood and you’ll find incredible complexity.
I’ve lately been interested in knowing if there are any absolute truths in life. There don’t seem to be many. Every time I feel like I’ve stumbled upon something that I can really get behind, or something that I agree with, I end up noticing a flaw, or more specifically, I realize that it is not a bedrock truth that can be applied to everything in life. This has kinda led me to the belief that there is really only one thing that you can trust, and that is your feelings. In other words, the only thing that you ever really know or experience first hand is what you feel- moment to moment. It’s impossible to ever feel what someone else feels, and it’s impossible for someone else to ever feel what you will feel. I kinda realized how powerful it is to form beliefs based on feelings. An example of this was the other night. I was going for a walk alone, when I came upon a house with glowing balls in the trees. I had never seen anything like them. They were these very large, glowing and pulsing orange balls that were in the trees! I became more and more confused because as hard as I tried to strain my eyes I could not see anything holding them up! They looked like floating orbs. I stood for a while and started to wonder if I was looking at some sort of alien consciousness that was hanging out in the trees. I went back the next morning and saw that there were in fact very thin wires holding them from branches.
The take away for me was that in that moment I did not know what it was. I began to firmly believe that they might be aliens, and so the feelings inside me reflected that. In other words, because I believed, I now know how I would react to being presented aliens. I realized that if you can get yourself to firmly believe something, you can actually us your reaction and bodily sensation to study how you might react. You can sort of run simulation on yourself to observe how you would react to any situation you can imagine. The only hard part is getting yourself to believe it. From there you just have to observe yourself scientifically and objectively.
This prompt sort of relates to something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I'm very interested in the idea of analogies. This sort of relates to what I wrote about on the previous prompt, and that is, because everything seems to begin with a feeling in the body, and because it’s currently impossible to share that exact sensation with someone else, we’re forced to use a whole variety of analogies to attempt to express our feelings. One example is through words. It’s actually quite interesting when you stop to think about how many barriers the initial feeling must go through to reach the person, when using the method of words.
First, the person who wishes to share the feeling must attempt to translate the emotion into language. Right there in that first step much of the original feeling may be lost during the conversion into language. From there the words have to be shared via sound. The way we speak, the rhythm, the tone- all of that, will also have an influence on the original feeling. By this point that original feeling has lost and gained all sorts of it’s original ingredients. From here, that sound has to travel through space, or air in most cases. Things that might not seem noticeable will have an affect, such as the way the sound echoes in a room, the way it struggles to be heard over loud noice. The next few steps are sort of a reversal of the first few steps. The recipient must absorb the sound. Their brain has to literally convert sounds in the air into information that they can process. This happens very quick, but I think it’s important to notice that the personal experiences that any given person has had during their life will influence how they react to any given information. You can’t know these factors just from looking at a person, so you don't quite know if they will react to what you’re saying in the way you’d intended to.
So all of this to say that the initially feeling felt in the body must go through an enormous amount of conversion and processing to be received by the other person. In many ways it’s a bit inefficient, mainly because it can be very hard to know if you’ve done a good job and instilling your intended feeling in another person.
Funnily enough, I often feel that some of the creatures that are best at sharing their feelings efficiently are animals and babies. They do this without the use of words. They may use sound and motion, but the time it takes for a person to understand their feelings is so much quicker than another adult.