interlude:sani
It’s been awhile since I’ve done this - frankly, I’m scared I’ve lost the touch. It’s been almost a year since I’ve ‘officially’ posted on this site. It feels daunting to jump back into something - especially something that gave me such a sense of purpose. I feel excited - like rediscovering an old trinket or memory, reexamining it all with new eyes. To be candid, this past year has been filled with so much change. Most times, it has felt like an overwhelming wave of change that I haven’t been able to handle. I have cried more this past year than I have in recent memory. I’ve lost people in my life I never thought I would, dealing with the reality that decisions have repercussions and consequences. I have also experienced some of the safest and secure joy I have ever felt. There have been so many emotions that I’ve felt it hard to come back to my practice of writing - of stillness - of observing the world around me because I’ve felt as if the world was consuming me. I’m excited to restart my love of writing, of exploring, of feeling it all - which brings me back to why I wanted to start this digital space for myself in the first place.
As I reflect on the last year and we head into a fresh start I realize that more than anything this year, I’ve felt love. Love from those around me as I’ve navigated so much newness into my life and really helped me try to usher in a new chapter. As I try to maintain and continue to cultivate a sense of self this year, it’s been most interesting to unravel and investigate why I’ve felt so deeply and so attached to people and things.
This past year, I found that the best thing to be able to move on from experiences is to understand that those that have had such a deep, complex and lasting effect on us in this lifetime surely have not passed us in lifetimes past and will not pass us in lifetimes to come. Those that we feel bound to and create such a deeper sense of meaning for us. Like they opened a cavern that could never be filled by anything else - it is deeply personal to them and their effect on us. It’s hard for me to detach. I feel a sense of attachment, strongly. What gives me enough solace to let go is to know that they will be with me again - in some way - in lifetimes to come. In this lifetime we may end up being friends but in past or future we could be parent-child, or classmate, or cousin, or perhaps in the next lifetime we’re able to work it all out - something we just couldn’t figure out in this lifetime - but maybe it all just works out the next go around. It is hard letting go of the familiar, to let yourself waver and quiver in the unknown - like a baby giraffe trying to find its legs to walk for the first time. We’re all layered and deeply complicated - we all work on a timeline that continues to get more messy and intertwined as we gain more experiences, as we age. Nothing is black and white anymore; feelings are messy; relationships feel gray - not cut and dry and ‘easy to fit in’ like they used to earlier in life. We’ve all gathered our baggage of memories - of people, of experiences, of inspiration, of life force - and we create new layers with new people as we age. It’s like this beautiful collage, layered upon each other in ways you never thought imaginable - like a watercolor being layered and layered until you create something you never even knew was possible. Though I trust that everything happens for a reason, it’s hard to trust the process. The process is tears, it’s pain, it’s doubt, it can feel extreme, it can very much feel very deep, it is consuming. By going through it you add on new layers to yourself while shedding layers you had put on before only to realize you’ve gained something even more interesting.
The year of Saturn's return occurs every 27-29 years in a person’s life when Saturn returns to the degree (and sign) that occurred when you were born. An average person will go through three cycles of Saturn returning during their lifetime - it’s said that the first marks the transition from childhood to adulthood, the second brings maturity, and the third brings wisdom. It is clear I left behind youth to enter this new phase of life and adulthood. The past year has brought about so much change that I have never felt more unstable. As I get used to the changes that occurred I know that they have been for the positive. This time period is known to redefine your path, and lead you to your deepest values and more authentic desires - which is what has led me back to writing, and feeling, and tapping into my well of emotions for the new year. This journey brings me so much joy and I’m thrilled to continue to share it all. All the love and happiness.
le quatrième: identity
I’ve been thinking a lot around identity lately, the main theme I’ve centered on for the last few weeks. Within our day-to-day lives, there are numerous ways around how we identify, and sometimes how society has ‘labeled’ or identified us - it shapes who we are and our outlook on the human experience. My latest development in thought has been around the idea of how we first see, perceive, and then identify ourselves and how that then translates to the view we see of the world around us. It sparked some key themes of identity, curiosity, and the innate vulnerability we are willing to share with those around us.
All of us, no matter who we are or where we were born, have identities that we have placed upon ourselves or society has boxed us into and placed upon us. There are many instances that this has happened in my life and I’m sure it has happened to you as well.
As I played around with about identity as a concept, I thought about how we each construct our own perception of ourselves. In my last article I go in-depth on the conscious and unconscious minds - and while they are the machine behind our psyche, my guiding principle for this article was to first and foremost focus on the stimuli we receive and interpret which ultimately get processed by our conscious/unconscious minds. And where better to begin than with the invention of the mirror. A mirror is a true interpretation and description of your ‘self’ - at least ones ‘physical’ self. It’s a way for us to materialize and create tangibility of self, a way for us to denote the ways in which we recognize ourselves, celebrate ourselves, contrast ourselves, and compare ourselves to others. But I started becoming fascinated with the idea of a mirror, a reflective tool and portal that allows us to interpret ourselves and create perception around ‘self’. It’s especially fascinating given the proliferation and abundance of mirrors in modern times, I honestly did not think twice about mirrors until I started thinking about identity - and as I researched for this article, came to realize that the abundance of mirrors in society was not always the case.
The earliest ‘invention’ of ‘reflection’ prior to mirrors were, well, bodies of water - mother nature herself! In ancient times, most people were only able to see themselves, albeit somewhat distorted, within rivers, creeks, and oceans. It was not a constant barrage of ‘self’ but more so a chance encounter to ‘face’ oneself within the reflection of water.
In mythology, the ancient Greek story of Narcissus, we see the idea of ‘self’ and reflection come to fruition when he looked at his reflection in the water and loved it so much that he fell in and drowned. And while Narcissus gets a bad rep in modern times (ie: narcissism), reflecting on the story in this new perspective made me realize that maybe he was just fascinated to finally see who he ‘physically’ was for the first time - and that’s pretty life-changing!
Anthropologists in the 1900s discovered the first object of a mirror in modern-day Turkey - it was made out of volcanic glass, polished to then form a reflective surface that embodies a mirror. In ancient Iraq, polished copper was utilized to create a mirror and by almost 2900 BC Egyptians started using bronze and copper as well for ‘mirrors’. Around the 5th century BC, the Greeks invented the first ‘portable’ compact mirror - again it was made out of polished stone but this time came in a little box for all to use while out on the town. By the 3rd century BC, the Romans created what is known as our ‘modern-day’ mirror in which they utilized glass for the mirror. With the fall of the Roman Empire, the craft of making mirrors was also lost and truly didn’t return until about the 13th century aka the Medieval Ages.
The most recent book that’s come into my orbit specifically talks about inventions in the Medieval Ages - focusing on the fact that while many of us idolize the period of the Renaissance as an incredible period for the rise of the arts, language, and culture, focusing on the ‘Dark Ages’ or the Medieval period is just as important when assessing for ‘cultural improvements or advancements’. The book is titled ‘Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter’ by Ian Mortimer. And within the book, the author talks about the proliferation of the modern-day mirror and how that affected people of all classes.
The social classes of the Middle Ages were based largely on occupation - there were those who ruled (kings, knights, lords), those who prayed (clergymen) and those who worked (serfs, farmers, etc). The idea of a ‘sense of self’ was more so a collective exercise - it was dictated by, literally, how others saw you and your occupation. Mirrors were not commonplace before the 13th century and ownership of a mirror in all echelons wasn’t commonplace until the 15th century. The author denotes how this seemingly innocuous idea of democratizing ownership of a mirror truly revolutionized and empowered people designated within ‘lower’ social classes. People could finally see who they physically were and realized the image everyone was created from was singular. Nothing about their face said they couldn’t be men of God, nothing about their eyes said they couldn’t be Kings, nothing about their posture said they couldn’t be of a higher status. The newly-found accessibility and natural reflection of a mirror started the revolution of self - the revolution of ambition, power, of individuality - you saw your choosing and whatever you wanted to be. People were able to create their own perception of self, and their own perception of the reality of their world.
Mirrors built momentum for the narcissistic (again, Narcissus gets a bad rep but his story does not have to be perceived as a negative!) exploration in the search of the individual self. One can argue that this sense of self and perception helped spawn the creation of many mediums of art (ie: the portrait) as well.
Nowadays, we see ourselves more than ever - reflections of ourselves in mirrors, receiving opinions about ourselves from others, pictures of ourselves on social media. It’s almost as if we’ve swung the pendulum a bit too far on the whole ‘seeing ourselves within reflections’ since most of us curate ourselves within our social media and online presence as well. But there’s something still very raw and natural about a mirror - a vessel that still shows us who we are at the very core, without biases from others, without filters, without any other man-made facade - mirrors still allow us the ability to connect with ourselves to then perceive ourselves in a new light.
Through this writing, I’ve come to realize many internal and societal structures help us build and mold our identities - which could be many distinct articles, each with its own merit and weight on the formation of identity. I hope one of the takeaways you have from this article is to become more aware of the everyday objects, discourse, art, or media that affect and influence your identity. As we become more aware of these objects influencing us, we become more intentional and refine our own identities thus refining our own outlooks on life. To me, it’s become apparent that mirrors create an intimate and personal entry point into the formation of our own personal identities.
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PS: If you want to learn more about the book on Medieval Ages click here
PPS: Linked here is the photo I’ve chosen for this article - it’s a bronze mirror from the 5th century BC and it’s housed at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley
le troisième: the adaptive unconscious
I’m on a flight back to NYC post-holidays and I can’t seem to shake the reverberating thoughts focused around the central themes of the last book I read over the break. My latest read has been a book gifted to me by a dear friend (if you can’t tell already, books are one of my joys in life!) titled, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Tim Wilson - a fascinating read about the unconscious and conscious mind, history of the study of the conscious self, and really trying to uncover what purpose, if anything at all, do the conscious and unconscious minds serve? More than anything, reading this book guided me to the realization that I don’t shape life as much as life shapes me. There is so much processing going on in our unconscious minds that it is inconceivable to fully self-actualize - and it begs the premise that it is mostly our unconscious self that actually guides our daily decisions and life. The adaptive unconscious can be defined as the mental processes that define and characterize our behaviors - with all these processes happening ‘behind the scenes’ so to say; rapid decisions and processes accounting towards the thousands per day that ultimately make up your daily habits and being. It’s an interesting theory that somewhat humbled me when I read through the book, a kind of surrender to a greater force or energy that is both within me and also affecting me on a daily basis.
During the onset of starting to dive into this book, I immediately analogized the adaptive unconscious to an LLM, a type of artificial intelligence (I know, I know, very VC of me/the term is saturated within the zeitgeist right now but stay with me, the analogy will actually help paint a fuller picture - I promise). An LLM, a large-language model, is a type of artificial intelligence model that can generate text, audio, visuals, etc. LLMs are a type of generative AI - meaning they ‘generate’ or produce some sort of output. They’re built upon large amounts of input (aka data); LLMs are trained on these huge sets of data - everything from music, to newspapers, to scholarly reports and articles, LLMs are able to swiftly sparse through thousands if not millions of inputs of data to produce an answer or text in mere seconds. And this is where the analogy comes in - as I was initially reading the book, the adaptive unconscious felt like an LLM to me; rapidly and efficiently making decisions based on data sets (previous human experiences, primal instincts, biases, feelings, etc.) to produce a decision point, behavior or external reaction. Wilson also mentions that the adaptive unconscious is also poor at long-term planning or fact checks (these are better determined using more recent perceptions by the conscious mind) - and similarly, many AI models ‘hallucinate’ - a concept in which the AI learns incomplete or incorrect patterns because they were fed unreliable data sets and end up producing incorrect responses. One example in the book was in regards to quick decision making during a hike - in this scenario a hiker walking along a dirt road spots a long brown object ten feet ahead of him, his first instinct was to fear that it was a snake based on the initial color and length of the object. Upon closer review as he neared the object, the hiker is at ease realizing that the object is just a mere branch of a tree fallen along the path. An innocuous example of the adaptive unconscious making a quick rationalization which did not end up being true - and where the conscious mind took in the information upon closer review and felt at ease. The link between the adaptive unconscious and LLMs/generative AI was fascinating to me and something I’ll probably fiddle with as I continue to think about the book.
A larger concept towards the middle of the book centered on introspection and trying to better understand how humans can know themselves, understanding the symbiotic relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. The main question standing - what is the point or larger reasoning for self-analysis? As you have probably gathered by now, a lot of my writing is around my own introspection or perspectives on life, the human experience, forms of connection, and anthropology. But if what Wilson is postulating is there is only so much we can know about ourselves and the world around us given that the adaptive unconscious processes and maps out our daily behaviors and actions, how much does introspection really tell us about ourselves? Or even further, is there another avenue beyond introspection that would help us as humans understand our own behaviors, feelings, and motivations on a deeper level?
There was an interesting concept in the book called Epiphenomenalism - the construct that the conscious mind does not actually serve any purpose, but instead the nonconscious/unconscious self is truly what dictates most of our daily decisions and lives. Wilson argues that the view of ‘self’ and ‘human personality’ lies within two places - ‘within the adaptive unconscious and within the conscious construct of self’. The conscious construct of self is also incredibly unreliable in my opinion, because as humans we are each unreliable narrators in our own stories and lives. And so how do we further develop our understanding of the unconscious if we are unreliable in self analyzing? Wilson postulates that fine-tuning an accurate, peaceful, and credible self-narrative is important and this is brought about by observing ourselves as if we were outside of ourselves. And what I mean by that is how are you perceiving yourself as a third-party; similar to the way I explained the theory of eternalism in my last article in regards to the perception of time, the way to more accurately construct a sense of self is to go beyond your physical self and observe yourself from outside yourself. One avenue mentioned in the book for achieving this was through both religious and spiritual practices. And it wouldn’t be an article of mine without the insertion of philosophy so my next thought process launched me into a deep dive into the philosophies of the mind, where I’ll demystify and spend the next chunk of this article.
And so my thought process went as follows - if the main objective to better understanding ourselves is to look at ourselves beyond ourselves (aka in the third person), this segues seamlessly into both religious and philosophical theories.
In many religious and spiritual texts, there have been themes of a cosmic force, higher energy, or some sort of ‘oneness’ that is within each of us. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Judaism all have some mention of the absence in the separation of existence between the human and higher cosmic force. There are three main philosophies of the mind that stood out to me as I continued down this rabbit hole:
Dualism is the concept that the mind and body are two distinct entities, unconnected
Nondualism literally translates to ‘not of two’ (coined from the Sanskrit term ‘advaita’) and the easiest way to conceptualize it is to understand that even within the highly various experiences we have as individual humans, underlying it all is a single, indivisible unity whose nature is pure consciousness
Monism suggests that the mind and body are manifestations of a single substance. Essentially, monism theorizes that the universe is made up of one ‘type’ of thing or substance and from which human-kind are derived from (to help conceptualize, monism and dualism are opposites)
Philosophies of the mind could be a whole separate article but for the sake of focusing on the adaptive unconscious and really getting to the crux of how we tap into better understanding the unconscious I’m going to focus on non-dualism. The non-dualist philosophy resonates the most with me because of the practices of meditation I have been incorporating more consistently into my life the past year. Meditation, for me, is a way to dissolve mind and body, to surrender and steep myself in a space beyond and above language - a silent space where I am able to connect myself, knowledge, and oneness into one. For me, it’s the easiest way I actualize the concept Wilson states about looking at oneself as a third party. And when I wake from meditation, I take a bit of that feeling into my daily life.
At the same time, part of me rattles with the idea of wanting to understand the unconscious at all - do I really need to understand it? Is this one of those annoying human traits of wanting (and feeling the need) to really ‘understand’ everything going on around me? Perhaps the unconscious is one of those concepts that are out of the reach of human comprehension; something we possess perhaps from a higher energy, perhaps not, that we should appreciate and nurture while we’re here. And for me, and what Wilson mentions in the book, that is through spiritual practice. Wilson does end up stating within the book that there is a human limit, at least currently, in understanding the unconscious. But for now, meditation allows me to decenter myself and perceive experiences from a third-party lens. When I meditate and focus on my breathwork, I’m much more still within myself, able to align myself with - what I believe - is the higher cosmic force that is around us and within us.
While there’s so much more to tinker on and think about after reading Strangers to Ourselves, I hope the various avenues of thought were stimulating and thought-provoking - from how emerging technologies are trying to emulate consciousness, to philosophies of the mind, to understanding the greater meaning of why we even want to understand the conscious and unconscious mind. I leave you with one of my most beloved quotes from Buddha, and I believe it encapsulates all that is non-dualist, rising above the body, mind, and spirit and emphasizes we all have so much more to learn and discover - “Nothing is as it seems, nor is it otherwise”
Much love and to the pursuit of lifelong learning!
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PS: If you’re interested in reading Strangers to Ourselves, here is the link to buy the book
PPS: If you’re interested in learning more about the philosophies of the mind here are some links:
PPPS: If you want a crash course on LLMs/Generative AI here is the link
la deuxième: breath x perception x time
For the last six months - since I ended my last big ‘adult’ relationship - I’ve been transfixed more than ever on learning about the loftiness of the human experience. How are we each perceiving the world around us and how does this perception affect and influence us?
As of late, I’ve also been reading more than ever. I just finished the book ‘Breath’ by James Nestor - a book a dear friend of mine gifted me to read after we talked about breathwork, connecting on wanting to feel more centered, and yearning to really take control of both stress and emotions. And through our conversations, really realizing that so much of our reality is in our control.
Here are three themes I want to center on and delve into within this piece of writing:
1) breathing 2) perception and 3) time
Through reading this book, I’ve also naturally wanted to further understand the study of time, and more so the philosophy of time.
For this piece of writing specifically, the question that became my north star was to define how are breathing and perception linked? And how do breathing and perception then potentially alter our view of time (while also realizing I am just a normal person trying to figure this all out!). These questions came about while I was reading Breath. The book made me realize that so much of your breath comes down to the manipulation of prana, or energy. Prana quite literally translates to energy, and a lot of your breathing creates physiological reactions on a molecular level within you, which in turn energetically shifts you - whether that's your emotions, stress, or perception. This shift of perception ultimately alters your state of being.
At the core of this, ontologically, energy is matter. And if energy/matter can ‘flow’ through us via various breathing techniques (ie: meditation, Wim Hof method, etc.) - how, if at all, could this affect our perception of the world around us. If you’ve ever meditated or focused on your breathing before - it can be either a painful reckoning with a restless mind, an inward journey of depth and unlock or something in between. On a personal note, I’ve been going to the Zen Center here in Brooklyn for the last couple of months to attend their Sunday morning sessions which focus on zazen breathing (a type of meditation practice) and have loved the structured time to focus on my breath and dive inwards. At the end of the three-hour session, I come out the other end of the experience in a shifted state. And that moment - that exact moment - when you open your eyes back up into the physical world with a shifted mindset, how does that manifest as a long-term shift in your mindset/perception?
In this book, the author talks about how with certain breathing methods, certain meditation practices, he has realized this psychological response of time slowing down, or kind of a disillusionment of time - let's just say disillusionment of his perception of time. Which I thought was really interesting. Let’s take the meditation example from above - sometimes when you sit down to meditate for 30 minutes it feels like 2 minutes and other times it feels like 30 hours. How can our mind bend or contort time, or our perception of time, so much that sitting with yourself can be either a joyful ride or torturous labor. Conscious breathing made me more aware of my perception of things, including time.
After I finished reading Breath, I lodged head-first into learning more about the philosophy of time and how we, as humans, have constructed to perceive time. The two main philosophies I’ll dive in with this writing are eternalism and presentism. At a birds eye view, here’s a breakdown of the two philosophies.
Presentism is the view that only the present moment exists. The past and future are not real, but are merely memories and projections.
Eternalism, on the other hand, is the view that all of time exists at once. The past, present, and future are all equally real.
Let’s start with presentism since this is a little easier to comprehend and digest. Presentism is the idea that the current moment is real, you are experiencing it, it is happening. And the past has happened, but it is behind you, it's a chapter closed. And then in regards to the future, whatever can happen may happen, and it will unfold as it will. There are multitudes of possibilities that could happen in the future within this philosophy. Presentism is a way that most humans currently perceive time - well at least it's the easiest way for us to explain time, right? It's the concept that time is linear and what is currently in front of you is your reality. The past is real, based on facts, and the future is yet to happen.
The other philosophy of time I want to dive into is called eternalism. This one, I think, is easiest to conceptualize as a 4-D cube. In this scenario, you are removing yourself and stepping out of time - you're looking at time and space from a third-party perspective, looking directly at this ‘block’. Many philosophers deem this concept the block theory when trying to explain eternalism. And so the idea is similar to presentism in that the present moment is real. But where it differs, is eternalism deems the past is just as real, as the present, as is as real as the future. It's this concept of what is happening in front of you is real. But at the same time, things that are happening in the past are just as real, as things that are happening in the future. This theory is obviously a little bit harder to wrap your head around, because it's just not in our ‘normal plane of existence’ in terms of understanding time. Since, candidly, it's hard to think about how Ancient Greece is happening at the same time as the present moment as is whatever is happening in 2050 or 3050. Why do we treat the past and future with a different lens than the present? The past and future are just as realistic as the present. We think of other locations aka ‘space’ as real even if we are not in that location at the time. We might be living in NYC but thinking about our friends in San Francisco - who are living a very real reality that you personally cannot see or know is happening right now. But then why do we think of time as any different or distinct from our perception of space? And then it also begs the question of trying to understand decision making and the reality of free will (existentialism) and the idea of possibilities for the future. It begs the existential question of how much of your current choices affect the future if the future is already happening.
Now, I want to preface that I am not an expert in these philosophies and candidly, eternalism dovetails into quantum physics (phew!) which, let’s just say, we can save for another time (ie: never). But for the purposes of this article around breathing x perception x time, this level of understanding of the two philosophies hopefully suffice to give you enough context. And it’s also the reason I'm more drawn to eternalism since it stretches my own bounds of perception, and this stretches the way that I can perceive things and I think that's much more fascinating.
And now coming back to breathing and coming back to the book, Breath, there's plenty of research and science on the effects of breathing on the human body. Specifically, emotions and reactions, helping to prevent disease, and more physiological benefits. And if that's the case, does breathing also affect perception and affect the way that we view consciousness because so many ancient practices and Eastern scriptures also mention the mental ‘clarity’ or ‘shift’ that comes with breathing practices. The Bhagavad Gita quotes things such as pranayama (a breathing technique from ancient India) - wherein this higher level of consciousness can potentially be reached. And this is reached through breathing. This begs an even larger question about if we can achieve these ‘higher levels’ of consciousness, are there things we haven't even thought of as I'm just scratching the surface in terms of understanding time and the different philosophies of time?
Here’s a breakdown of my current understanding and internal flowchart of how this works. 1) how does your breathing affect your level of consciousness 2) how does that then affect your perception of many things, of those that I'm interested in right now is, mainly how does that 3) affect our perception of time and how we view time.
I’m drawn to this topic of breathing x perception x time because it allows me to think about time in a more expansive way. As I learn more about this concept, eternalism can help to understand the nature of consciousness and how it relates to time.
At the end of it all, I do think there is a link between the role of breathing in the perception of time. In a nutshell, I believe that breathing can help to ‘slow down’ time and make one more present in the moment. In my own life, I’ve found that breathing helps me connect with my intuition and to access a higher level of consciousness.
I’m interested in the philosophy of time because it helps me further understand myself and the world around me. And isn’t that what we’re all continuously working through? As I continue to dive into topics I’m energetically drawn to, I’m more inclined than ever to believe that time is not a linear progression, but rather a complex web of interconnected moments.
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PS: if the topic of the philosophy of time resonates, check out these awesome resources I’ve really enjoyed: Podcast linked here + Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy + retro-looking video on time
PPS: if the topic of breath resonates, check out these additionally awesome resources I’ve really enjoyed: Author of Breath + Sudharshan Kriya breathing method+ Wim Hof breathing method
le début
I think it’s time. Time to start sharing these delicate, and somewhat vulnerable, inner thoughts with the rest of the world. For the past few years, as I try to heal in therapy like most younger millennials, I’ve been using writing as a way to create space for me. Space for myself to veer into territories unknown for me, following my own instincts for (sometimes) the first time, ever.
Anthropology is a subject that continues to fascinate and occupy much of my free time - and most times, creeps into my booked time as well. It’s been illuminating learning more about the history of the human experience. And that organically dovetails into thinking about your own experience and family relations. There’s something about the first major death that happens to you - and how that impact reverberates downstream to so many daily little decisions. I lost the only grandfather I knew - someone who instilled strength, resilience, and a good dose of stubbornness into this already stubborn Taurus. He was the patriarch of our family, a fiercely independent 93-yr-old who insisted on continuing to do his own errands, continuing his involvement in the local community board, and ensuring everything is running tip-top shape for those around him. While in the last few years, the reigning dominance has been shrouded by new concern from those around him that he is taking on too much for his age, he should rest, etc. that they say to keep those that have the privilege to age in a box, aiming to chain them to dependence - but Tata (a south Indian term of endearment for our darling grandfather) did not subscribe to that, he refused. He taught me all the big secrets of life, and in his passing he might have taught me his biggest lesson yet - through the past four months since his passing, my entire lifeview has shifted. I’m looking at every interaction, relationship, moment of sorrow, joy, amazement at intricate architecture, feelings of the warm sun on my skin at sunset, and realizing the dichotomy of the miniscule to massive perspective of the human experience.
We go through the seemingly banal everyday existence and forget that there is so much more to existence than this human life. Yet, there comes a privilege we have in being a conscious being during this lifetime - able to receive stimuli, to then send chemical reactions through our bodies, illicit an emotion, to then shift our perspective, ultimately impacting our opinions and our lifeview. And get this - we receive 11 million stimuli every second. Every. Second. 11 million. And we are only able to actually perceive and respond to 40 of those 11 million stimuli. Think of how much more is around us at this very second that you just aren’t able to successfully perceive right now because, evolutionarily, we haven’t progressed enough to take in everything. And yet, with just being able to take in such a miniscule amount, we are able to learn and grow so much with this life. It is astounding. And it’s instances like this that feel ultimately like the point of this lifetime - it’s an intrigue as old as art.
Even in this life, it’s hard to even encapsulate how we are fully feeling - at least within linguistics. I had a conversation with a friend about this topic recently - the idea that linguistics can only encapsulate our thoughts as well as we are able to express ourselves within the guardrails of that language. Sometimes there truly are not enough, or maybe even nonexistent, words to express oneselves. It’s how some say ‘love is just a feeling’ or when everyone around you is getting married and you ask them how did they know their partner was the one they answer with a simple ‘when you know, you know’. There are just some emotions, feelings, reactions, or energies that when trying to express via language, it somehow falls short of the vastness of those human experiences.
This is where art comes in - and how I’ve only recently, at the ripe age of 29, have started to really appreciate art, in more forms than what I had previously associated with ‘art’. More than the largest museums I’m privileged to live near, more than the critically acclaimed films nominated for national awards, and the latest album from an acclaimed singer. But now art is everywhere. Art is everyday. Art is how we make sense of this life. It’s a patchwork of those called to the higher energy source, able to express themselves in such a gifted way, those of us privileged to witness and absorb their work are lucky. There’s lots to the creation of meaningful art - you intentionally create the space to tell your version of creativity, whatever is making its way through you (you, as the vessel) works through every inch of the artist. The creative source creates such an impact on the artist that the receivers of art are mesmerized by the way the artists’ internal questions and lifeview speaks through their art. We all have our lens on the vastness, and once you’re awake to the reality of it all, it’s hard to not desire a deeper dive into what this is all about.
Once you realize how fleeting this whole opportunity is, this opportunity of being a human able to perceive and rationalize thoughts and emotions - you tend not to sweat the small stuff as much. There’s so much more we can cultivate and create and question and wonder and gaze in awe at. This life is too vast and mysterious for us to waste it away in thoughts or emotions or habits that undermine our ability to connect with a higher power, the creative source.
Thanks for taking the time to read through this, if it resonates I would very much enjoy hearing from you.