Maybe nothing means anything and it’s all a big joke. Maybe the fact that you love one person and hate another, or cry to one song and throw up to another, is nothing more than a coincidence. Maybe seeing it as anything more than this is a sign that you’re narcissistic and self-absorbed. Maybe.
Or maybe…
Maybe it is all connected. Maybe there are reasons, far too complex for your tiny mind to comprehend, why you’re drawn toward certain things and away from others. Maybe there is an invisible thread running through the things you love and the things that leave you cold.
Scientifically, I can’t see anyone proving either perspective right or wrong any time soon. But that doesn’t mean that a better life can’t be had if consciously choose to fall on one side of the argument or the other.
Personally? The second one. I make the bold and foolish assumption that if something affects me, it affects me for a damn good reason. Why do I do this, when I have no way of knowing if I’m actually right? Because it makes my life a lot more meaningful.
You see, even if I’m kidding myself, me believing there to be something behind what I like and don’t like launches a question in my mind… “Why?” When I get that “Why?” feeling, I can either refuse the call, or heed the call. When I have my head screwed on properly, I heed.
Off I go looking for an answer. I don’t hope to find a definitive, true-for-all-of-time answer to my questions – I think that would be very limiting. I’m just looking for a microscopically deeper understanding of why I might respond a particular way to one thing and another way to another.
Where this has found me recently is getting all forensic on the songs I love, the films that make me cry, the particular episodes of TV shows that for God knows what reason I can’t stop thinking about… I’ve been putting on the surgeon gloves, so to speak, and shoving my hand inside the body, in the hope that by feeling around its innards I might learn something more about how these things work.
Tomorrow, I’ll share one of these surgeries with you.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Rainer Marie Rilke