I lay here wanting to sleep, a frequent feeling these days. I worry about the stages of depression. I have heard it described as immediate, similar to the way it can be uplifted, but I also fear that it is a progression. If it is anything at all? Which I suppose it isn’t. Unless it can be understood as a chemical imbalance. Which I suppose it can’t because balance itself is a human rule, one that the universe will never follow. Here starts the rabbit-hole thinking.
I consider how unfair it is to be a human being with intellectual reason. We are given the most ironic and maleficent ability. To see into the mysteries and inconceivable nature of the universe but to never be able to grasp them completely in understanding.
I consider the concept that nuclei never actually touch. More specifically, the atoms that make up my entity and house my nuclei, never ACTUALLY touch anything. Rather, it is shifting force fields of membranes and electromagnetic invisibilities. Isn’t that fascinating?! I understand that protons go with electrons and there are these minute building blocks of our planet and universe, but I will never be able to figure the “why”! In fact, what I now know will fade sooner than later and once again I will have to learn the magic of existence. Fuck that! I am given a taste, a glimmer, just enough to understand how the universe is insurmountable and impossible to understand.
I consider the totality of the known universe and can understand that it is a comparable concept to a water droplet. The ratio of size and understanding that we have of a drop of water could be what we actually exist inside of for wiser, older, more cosmic entities than us.
I consider how I wish I was smarter. How I wish I was less human. I wish I could transcend my evolutionary instincts and exist in a place of knowledge absorption. I wish I could learn more. Get it quicker and deeper. Invent and predict for myself. But I can’t. I am left with faint traces of understanding that leave me wanting more but knowing my limitations. I am struck with the cruel reality that I am human and have evolved with the shackles of pain and survival instinct.
I consider that if I were to be tortured, mutilated, or even threatened with such, the pain would make me give up everything. I exist in my own little universe and no matter what - no matter the threat level to conception, other humans, or even the entirety of the universe itself - I am programmed and conditioned over millions of years to preserve ME! How fucked up is that? I have all of the understanding and every shred of evidence, that my life is meaningless in comparison to the preservation of another important thing - say the earth. It is possible that there is a great enough threat to my self-perception of well being, that I would watch the earth implode in exchange for another handful of breaths.
I consider that I am even a prisoner to thought. I can consider a natural principle long enough that I want to cry, yet my thoughts will still wander to trivialities:
“When is my game tonight?”
“Will I get drunk after?”
“How do I feel about my job?”
Which are thoughts, that on a cosmic scale, are infinitely less significant than a single photon traveling for millions of years to reach my eye that is pointed to the stars.
I simultaneously long for, and dread my release from contemplation. I mentioned that balance is a human concept and rule, but I was wrong. It is a word that allows us to understand one of the constants in the universe, action and reaction. It too provides me with solace; my conundrum coincides with universal law.
As all things do.