Nowadays time withers by without an eye being batted. I have had many showers but few dreams. The necessity that I had in the past of having to ask questions and abide by tenets has worn off - in its place are on the surface, words like career, promotion, salary increase, jacket vs no jacket, IGM vs IG BCE, and descaling powder; down beneath scatter shreds of hope, love, and an empty antagonism. There is a full story behind each of the words, but the words together convey no novel message and accomplish no coherent whole. The things I aspired to could often be found in these words, and they would dazzle me if I dare look at them, but nothing quite corroborates them so each continues to linger singularly, like the lines in the SQL codebase I wrote for an analytics project that was later parked.
When I cherish something every so often I carry within me many added normative assumptions about it, like with career, I envision respect and a certain suspense of personal interest for the collaborative gain; with romance, I picture sincerity and genuine smiles and thoughtfulness; with friendship, I prefer it to not dilute with a difference in time or a divergence in location. These assumptions usually prove to be untrue. And the longer I have held these assumptions, the better and more capable I am of refuting them. I have a sizable reservoir of sly gestures, sarcastic remarks and terse adjectives for this particular use. In refuting these assumptions I get to feel unburdened. But because after they are refuted what I intend to cherish becomes less cherishable, I continue to hold on to them.
The reality I am faced with has the habit of being very multifaceted. In it many storylines, characters, and all shades of sanities coexist. However pompous I am, I would not regard my storyline or the world from my point of view as representative of the wider picture. But neither seems there any storyline that could be. Perhaps this is why Sartre says that men are condemned to be free and that Heidegger says that we are thrown into the world. The leftover option for me, under the curse of the freedom and being thrown, is then to attempt to flail at least more stylistically. My Barenboim collection, my work involved in the unnecessarily convoluted projects, and my bursts of obsession with good food are all part of this attempt. Tomorrow, I'm meeting with someone to whom I have barely spoken, in a coffee shop where I have never been; next week I will participate in a development center to determine how my skills can be better used by a corporation I work for; and then perhaps there will be beers, friends and some festive noises that narrate the same story in different forms and with new metaphors. For these events my dress code, the allowable amount of cologne, the words I utter and the pictures I paint will change significantly. And I shift between these events like a seasoned party animal going between parties, accustomed to the cycles of being eager and being tired without any unduly expectations or out-of-whack actions. After all, upon realizing reality as a whole as largely unalterable, I have chosen to focus my efforts on the more manageable components of it, and only concern myself nominally with the others things.
I remember distinctly though, that in the past I used to possess the capability to see things through some different lenses - in all of which a certain inner flame was burning, rendering everything I saw in hues that were more upbeat. I was marching towards somewhere. Since then I have spent a lot of time looking for that flame, through bubbly afterwork beers, hotpots, tanks, dates, anything, in hopes of finding it. And there, I have yet succeeded.
