Late night posting is a bit like writing drunk - not all the faculties are there, but the mind might be a bit more free, a little more unfiltered. I tend to rant and ramble more in the late night, and that is saying something. However, most of my posts have been done in the late night, because that is when I usually have some time to sit and write without interruption.
Our surroundings affect us in so many different ways and we don't recognize most of the influences they have, because we aren't really paying that much attention. It is a bit like macro photography in a sense that while focusing on the minutiae, the rest of the world is missed, except we are focusing on the rest of the world, not the minutiae that are nudging us this way and that.
We might see the big things, but miss the thousand small things that compound to multiply the effects. This of course works in both directions, with a lot of unnoticed positives helping us on the way, or a lot of missed negatives holding us back, sliding us down and over that edge into the abyss.
We consistently overweigh the large events we notice, and underestimate the impacts of the small that we don't, because that is just the way the brain works. If we aren't even aware of all the influencing factors, how can we attribute the affect they will have, or the causes of our outcomes? We can only intentionally only process what we are conscious of, but that doesn't mean that we aren't processing in the background.
There is a plethora of things going on in the brain and body that we just have no idea about in the moment, but will fundamentally affect us and the decisions we make. There are obvious things like if we are hungry, sick, tired, or drunk that we might be able to understand quite easily and maybe even allow for to some degree. Yet, there are millions of factors that will also impact on us, like our hormones in the moment, whether we are feeling confident or not, what clothes we are wearing, what the temperature is, if we are slightly cold or warm, or the myriad variations in emotion that we can never fully recognize.
Man is a universe within himself.
And like all universes, there are systems, suns and planets that are unknown and unexplored, yet are there, spinning through space, causing all kinds of effects on other bodies in the system. There are also blackholes that trap pieces of us, and will never let them go, and unknown forces and gravities that are pulling and pushing us with invisible hands. Well, invisible to us.
How can we "know ourselves" as well as some people claim, when we don't know all the things that affect us, nor how they affect us. How can we know ourselves when the conditions we are within are also unknown, and we have no idea how the known pieces, let alone the unknown pieces are going to react?
But, even though life is full of ambiguity, there are some things we do know affect us heavily, like the food we eat, the people we surround ourselves with, the content we consume, and where we choose to put our attention, our energy, our thoughts and our actions.
We might only be able to intentionally affect a tiny sliver of all the variables, and that might just be enough to be the difference between the experience of life feeling self-directed, or without agency. I feel that we are too often disenfranchising ourselves by removing our own accountability and agency over our behavior, and what we end up being is weightless and invisible in our own universe.
Taraz
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