Tag: irrational

The Sweetest Of Nihilists

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Not long now. This is my third last piece and I’m becoming acutely aware of making the most of what’s left. I love starting things and while I certainly don’t finish everything, I do also enjoy that rounded feeling of completion. There are times I overplay the ceremonial nature of the last night, or the last time, or the last whatever and have learnt over the years it is slightly unnecessary. Sometimes you just have to get on with things, be the stone cold killer who calls time. Let’s see how I do on Saturday then, stone cold or the more familiar sentimental killer. Enough of that though, save it for another time.

Now then, to make the most of what’s left – stares blankly at the white wall in front, searching for something in what is ultimately nothing – but really does it matter. Does it change anything if this piece is nonsense and doesn’t discuss something deep and meaningful, virtuous or god forbid political. I’ve given up on politics, well on here at least. I enjoy it but it can end but being a judgemental one sided screaming match and nobody needs that in their lives. I said goodbye with Trump, the British stuff is so entangled in it’s own bullshit it’ll never end. Which leaves me with a few things but all I have is this blank wall. As I said though, it doesn’t really matter. Without doubt their is a nihilist within me and I let him out from time to time. Rational and irrational go to war over who can push the nihilist back in his box, the box of pointless nothing. The stone cold serial killer as nihilist? No, I miss the point of my own nihilism. And there’s always a point.

It’s my birthday today. I don’t know how I feel about that. One year older. It doesn’t really bother me in an excitable way but there will always be a bit that enjoys it. I can understand why people stop being fussed about celebrating them as they get older though. For some it’s a denial of their own decay yet sometimes you just don’t give a shit. There can be a lot of bravado involved at times like this, and we all love a bit of attention and fussing as the dog enjoys their belly rubbed, but really it is just another day. Yet it isn’t, it’s a day that reminds you that despite almost impossible odds, that after over four billion years of the earths existence, everything in that time fell into place and your consciousness, whatever the hell that is, became real. Perhaps it was always real and will always be, but whatever it is, the odds against us are staggering and we’re still here to be aware of it. We’re still here despite everything. And with that we continue to defy the odds. That’s probably worth celebrating. Marvel at the beauty of life not the self-absorbed indulgence of decay. Get back in thy box sweet nihilist.

That Feeling

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I was feeling a bit deflated. Football will do that to you. This was nearly not going to be a piece on getting that feeling about things and what it means. I just did the television version of leaving the stadium early. Brighton scored a last kick of the game type equaliser against my team and I switched it off. I never do that. In the end it wasn’t the last kick because we went up the other end, got a corner, a penalty and with the actual last kick of the match scored the winner. Football, bloody hell. I had the feeling we would hold on before they scored. I even challenged what feels like an unspoken rule to never openly predict even to yourself that something is or isn’t going to happen that will benefit your team. I taunted myself in the belief they wouldn’t score because I was so convinced my feeling was spot on. It was going to be the basis of my entire argument in this piece.

Football is great for getting that instinctive feeling about something. I got the feeling Maguire was going to score our initial equaliser earlier in the game just before he did and that set me off. In truth there have been loads of times I’ve got the feeling he was going to score and it’s come to nothing but I’ve homed in on the one time it proves an idea I want to believe in. The truth is though that we do get instinctive feelings about things and they come true. I have no idea what it means and despite there being an infinite amount of books out there with theories I doubt nobody really knows. Trust your gut, go with your instincts.

We have some of the best days and the best adventures when we do trust our guts and go with whatever momentary instincts we feel. I have had some fun as a result. Just imagine we lived every day like that though, it would be a type of carnage for sure. It would certainly be exciting, if not frustrating too. The constant lack of rational actions. But then people seem reasonably irrational in their actions already. Maybe I’m just too rational, think out each situation too much and never trust my gut feeling and which ever flow it could take. Well I trust it today just before we had a goal scored against us. We did go up the other end and get one ourselves so maybe I was right, but also maybe I wasn’t. Really I have no idea. I’m not sure I’m connected along the earths meridian or energy lines to a football game thousand of miles away. Maybe I’ve just watched enough football to know or understand the likely outcomes. Look at me trying to rationally break it down. You see that’s where I go wrong. Got to stop trying to understand things and just go with it. Go with that feeling. It certainly makes life more interesting, maybe I should experiment a little with that for the next few days.

One Moment, Four Eyes

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There is a saying out there in the ether that goes along the lines of ‘no two people experience a moment the same way’. At about ten o’clock this morning I scribbled down ‘narrative confirming events & narratives to mould events’. Unfortunately the precise meaning of that seems to have slipped my mind in the time between but it was undoubtedly wise in one way or another. At this time I had just finished delivering bread having got up to do so about seven hours earlier and after three hours sleep having finished making pizzas late the night before. When people sleep this little, and what appears to be quite regularly these days, they have a habit of being a little grumpy and irrational. This morning was one of those days.

I can’t remember exactly what I meant but I think it had something to do with one of the people I was delivering to asking the annoying “Have you done this?” Have you done that?” despite the fact I always do this and that, and haven’t not once. I gave a pretty straight “Yes, no and I will” but really I wanted to let her know I didn’t appreciate her accusing me of not knowing how to do my relatively easy and straightforward job. Had I not been so tired and grumpy I suspect I wouldn’t have even noticed it as an issue but the mind can play tricks on you when it’s stretched.

This then was one version of an experience. Later as I drove away I mumbled to myself how she was rude and probably an idiot. This is most likely unfair and I suspect this is the case because I attempted to look at it from another perspective. Namely, hers. I remember when I was attempting to make a little sense of the world in my twenties I discovered the concept of compassion. To be able to experience compassion, one technique is to put yourself in the other persons position and view the event through their eyes. Maybe this is giving her an excuse and she was just being rude but perhaps there was a reason she was being so specific and direct with these questions. It is possible the other drivers haven’t always done these things requested but there is every chance she has been told by her boss to make sure of this and that, and she is stressing them to me because she knows she’ll get grief if they’re not done. Whether this is simply me giving her an excuse and letting her off I will never know. Also, she may have not even been that rude and I was just overreacting in my mind. Really though I don’t need to know because it doesn’t matter. The moment I thought that this may be a reason for her attitude my own anger towards her dissipated and I felt what can only be described as compassion. I had let go and the chain of negative emotions had been broken.

This was one moment and those were two ways to experience it. How narratives come into it is arguably less clear but most likely had something to do with allowing the idea that everyone and everything was out to annoy me. This shaped how I felt the situation unfolded and how I viewed it. It could be a good idea to write down a few notes alongside the main note for understanding purposes but one step at a time. I’ve been writing this blog so long and I can count the amount of times I’ve written notes like that on one hand. Still, there was something in there worth writing about I’m sure. I’ll keep my eyes peeled and try to spot a more suitable example for next time.

Instinctively Morbid Curiosity

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Two ambulances just raced past my window. If this were a busy city and not a seaside village, and if it had been just one ambulance and not two, I would have thought nothing of it. Two ambulances racing passed in a slightly out of the way spot raises the curiosity alarm. Are they heading towards the beach? If so you’d imagine there would be a coastguard follow close behind, but maybe the coastguard is already there. Perhaps there’s been a crash on the road, even though there are small and slow roads around here idiots still treat it like there’re in a rally that only they know about. I’m sure there are endless possibilities and I should stop this bizarrely morbid curiosity i’ve got going on. We’re strange though human beings, we do want to know. We want to know what has happened. We want to jump in our cars and follow them. We want to drive by and slow down under the pretence of driving carefully and respectfully passed the incident even though we forget the road and don’t once take our eyes off the scene. I drove passed a fresh accident in Portugal once, the body of a once living, talking and breathing human being was just lying there beside the road in the rain with a white sheet over it. I won’t forget that scene, it also makes me slightly less tempted to drive slowly passed any other accidents. But I still will because I’m curious and human.

I suspect it is probably related to some survival instinct within us. The same thing that leads us to search out for the bad news instead of the good. We want to know what the danger is. Perhaps those two ambulances just raced off to an incident which I should know about because knowing about it will in some way help me to stay safe. Perhaps it’s part of some snowballing incident which I must see so I know to get out of it’s way. Most likely not but something instinctive within me wants to know and there is always a rational explanation we can use if we want to take the fun out of anything. It is far more satisfying to imagine we’re somehow uniquely curious beings, alone with our Sherlock Holmes levels of observation, understanding and discovery. But we’re probably not. We’re just scared animals wanting to know if what we just saw may in any way lead to something that could hurt us, or something that we could learn from so to prevent ourselves one day hurting ourselves in the same situation. Having broken it down slightly it does make me feel silly for wanting to jump in my car and follow them. Let’s be honest it’s pretty ludicrous behaviour. It’s so unfortunate that my instincts are therefore irrational. But irrational keeps us alive then. Or maybe not. I’m sure I can probably work out a rational argument to disprove that either way.

An Unknown Transition Into The Unknown

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I’m not someone who feels the need to play music all the time. I enjoy silence. I enjoy podcasts. I enjoy music. But a balance between them is vital, as is my mood on their regularity. I have been listening to some music for the last half hour while I was online and avoiding writing this. When I see people listening to music and being able to study, read or write, basically concentrate, I have often wished this was something I was capable of. The words coming on this page would be inspired by the sounds around me but I can’t focus and not even one word follows.

I was listening to some dub and desiring a party or a festival. These last few years have been an interesting transition in life. Everyone goes though different chapters in their lives, even if they marry at 18, never divorce, never leave their home town and keep the same job, there will still be chapters within this. Mine have been slightly more adventurous and I can recognise periods when I wanted nothing but travel and others when I felt a need to rest for example. It took about five years from my first desires for rest to get to were I am now but life is all so extreme that I’m still longing for adventure equally alongside some kind of ‘normal’ existence. ‘Normal’ is a strange and inexplicable concept, which is why I won’t even try explaining what I mean by it and I know my version of it will still be a long way from the man with many chapters in the same town above. But fuck, right now having listened to a little music and recollected a few memories, there is a part of me that wants to put down the ‘normal’ so much and pick up the alternate once more.

I have also come to appreciate this life though recently and value the people living it far more than I ever did at the height of being a prick in my more adventurous moments. I’ve come to realise there is as much value in this existence as one lived with daily excitement and variety, it’s different value but it’s still value regardless, as it too is exciting and varied regardless. That doesn’t stop me wanting to drop it all and jump on a boat heading somewhere wild and exotic though but I doubt that will ever leave me. Equally this current existence is an extreme in the other direction as I know the ideal will be somewhere in the middle. I only meant to come here for a few months to help a mate out and it’s been nearly six months. He’s taking great pleasure in reminding me a few more months and I’ll have broken my longest job record. With this pizza takeaway now being a thing and coronavirus being an even bigger thing it seems I may still be sitting in this same seat in four months trying to understand what the drink in my hand represents.

Is this now life? Well it’s the current version and I’m starting to learn enough from it that interesting things happen when we roll with whatever comes up. In a way that’s a freedom more real than any enforced search for a liberty that ultimately becomes constrictive. There are always things out of our control which make us jump between paths, enduring the grey transitional space between, but once we’re actually on it; life never really seems all that bad. Quite often the opposite. It has become clear to me recently that we’re owed nothing, their is no destiny, that desires will never happen if we wait for them to and ideas of fairness miss the harsh unknown nature of life. It is an irrational and absurd world. Nothing bad has happened but seemingly I’ve managed to understand the knowledge I previously had and it all seems to make a little more sense. This is why discipline is necessary. Why being able to focus the energy to achieve the goal is the only way we can really get things done. Why I’m curious, excited and unsure about what comes next. It’s a little unknown. But then everything always has been.

Inanimate Anger Destructed

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Has anyone every banged their leg on a table and got angry with the table? How about when constructing some IKEA furniture and getting pissed off because what you’re experiencing is not what the instructions suggest you should be? How about installing something on a computer and the procedure not proceeding as simply and immediately as you assumed it would? What is it that frustrates us about inanimate objects? Computers possibly less inanimate that tables, but the idea that something that cannot think for itself and just exists angers us is an interesting one. What is it that enrages us so much and why is it that animate objects like people or animals do not illicit such angry responses from accidental actions that may do mild harm or inconvenience despite the fact they’re to varying degrees conscious of their actions.

Perhaps we instinctively don’t want to do harm to living creatures because we recognise the life within them and the suffering our anger will bring. That may be true for some but certainly isn’t true for others. There are far too many examples of people taking our their anger on either their partners or pets for example. Maybe we know an inanimate object cannot fight back although it would be worth referencing partners and pets again here. Also I’m sure there are plenty of videos online of doors doing exactly that as they swing back and hit the aggressor in the face. What it may be then is an unconscious frustration with ourselves and our inability to not walk into tables, build confusing furniture or download software.

Anger is a funny thing when you break it down. That angry driver shouting at you because of some mild traffic faux pas you just committed may appear to be angry at you but there’s a good chance his real anger is linked to something else. The same when partners get annoyed at you for some little thing you’ve done and appear unreasonable with it, there’s a good chance something else is bothering them, be it with you or something else entirely unconnected in their life. With inanimate objects we have nobody to justify the error in the moment with as we’re the only one involved. We can lay blame in the direction of nobody except ourselves and this is very hard to accept, especially when usually everyone else is responsible for whatever it is that makes life an angry one.

We’re simply frustrated with ourselves then. Frustrated we cannot avoid IKEA or their tables. Frustrated then that we cannot do better or are not better at whatever it is that is enraging us so much. Why not use this frustration to get better, become an accomplished furniture constructor or be someone capable of not walking into the furniture once constructed. Perhaps then it’s about using this emotional response in a productive way and not allowing it to hold us back. A life constructed as opposed to one destructed.