Tuesday June 25, 2019

River of cars, sleepless night. Mississippi combustion engine goddamn. How are we to sit, how are we to practice loving-kindness, amid the unbearable moral burdens of our time? This question haunts me, prompts torrents of words. I lie awake in bed mulling it over, unable to fall back asleep after a fire alarm goes off at 5:00am. Perhaps I’m already dead, I think to myself. Perhaps I’ve been so for some time, my soul consigned to some after-the-end-of-history purgatory, the rotten world of princes and principalities. All it takes, however, is the sight of a pair of pigeons to convince me otherwise. I refuse to mire myself in the needless suffering of an overly grim worldview. Sunlight, temperate climate, free parks and museums, diverse assortments of humans, air filled with the music of many languages: Eden remains in potentia all around us.

3 thoughts on “Tuesday June 25, 2019”

  2. Where we choose to look and what we choose to retain or mull over and cling to: that’s part of it. All of that definitely seems to affect the quality of experience, with the latter mainly composed of thoughts and sense-data passing (in a mostly unwilled manner) in and out of consciousness. If I dwell on suffering, it seems to fill in the contours of my reality-tunnel, causing me to miss out on other signals and potentials. I’m not counseling willed ignorance or some rigid commitment to “affirmations” and “positive thinking” — but for me, at least, thinking about suffering is sort of like my default mode, my starting point, my base of operations, and so I find it useful to “re-mind” myself now and then of other possibilities: a kind of redirection of attention elsewhere.

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