Karma

"There are some changes coming in my life. I can feel them already. My tarot reading yesterday, by my mother over a toke and a glass of red wine, coincided with the first day of spring. My boyfriend commented cynically as I described its revelations in brief; "It sounds like it just tells you things you already know." And yes… yes, it does. But there is something eerie and scintillating about plying chance and finding it synchronous with what you "already know." They say that our brain makes decisions long before we ever consciously reach them, and it doesn’t surprise me. Most of what I’ve come to discover has felt more like an unlocking, a reminder, even like a swift round kick in the ass from myself at times for not re-cognising it sooner."

I’m doing it again…

A fresh cup of coffee over a fresh piece of mint gum gives, for a brief moment, the impression of that ‘holiday feeling’, born of the association slowly made over the years between winter mornings and peppermint lattes. Some day, I like to think, my house will smell like coffee, peppermint and pine all winter long.

It’s my fourth grade classroom, at a West Olympia elementary school in the mid nineties (replete with mauve, teal and salmon detailing). We have the fourth and fifth grades together, actually - part of this ‘Alternative Education Program’ idea that’s going around. On this particular afternoon, we have all pulled our chairs away from the tables and over to the blackboard into a sort of class huddle, some of us standing or on the floor. We’ve begun to take a look at our solar system, and my amazing teacher has just explained to us the mind-blowing phenomenon of gravity and our orbit around the sun. It is amazing. Amazing enough that even as I try to listen - and I am focusing quite hard indeed - my brain runs off with it all and has its way. But then, to make sure we have the concept, he asks us to raise our hands if we can explain why it is the world itself is turning.

Of course, I raise my hand. Immediately. And I explain to them, matter-of-factly, from somewhere off in the clouds: it feels to me sometimes that as we walk, we turn the earth.

This, as I recall, was followed by an awkward silence, then some quiet juvenile laughter. My teacher (as wonderful as he was) let me know that wasn’t quite the answer he was looking for, and went on to survey the rest of the waving hands.

I remember that moment from time to time, especially when I’m having difficulty working around an idea about the world that seems established. It helps quite a bit to remind myself that the closer you look at something, the more explaining there is to do - but when you swing out wide and let that focus fuzz up a little, so simple a story can suffice to satisfy the Why of things. Heck, we used to be satisfied that the earth was flat, until we traveled far enough to notice things disappearing over the horizon. Chances are that before that point, the world at large was just as comfortable with its existing notions about the universe as we are with what we believe to be the truth now (however comfortable that is).

Of course I’ll never stop digging for Why, or looking at things as closely as I possibly can. I simply shall not ever forget how nice it is to have a little answer, and just let it imply that something more tantalizing hides underneath.

Lately, something has been stopping me from writing. Actually, that’s not right. I have real moments of inspiration, and I seriously get rolling for a while. Ideas verily erupt in my brain, leaving me with (quite realistically) more to expunge than seems physically possible. But the more time I spend with something, the less novel and exciting it becomes, and I slowly grind to a halt, no longer seeing what made it so great in the first place.

The sticky thing is the drive to create the immaculate. We make all attempts to give birth to the flawless - the culmination of the things we got right and the things we learned the hard way, answers for questions made concrete so we’ll never have to ask them again. But there is always a portion of the result which we did not account for, or something out of our control; whatever it is, the product of our creation is not immaculate. It is flawed, though striving, and yet we find it is all the more beautiful for its uniqueness. This is the propagation of humanity: a plethora of potential iterations actualizing everywhere. We are faced with such abundant variety that we tend to look, in western culture, towards the purity of a thing. We favor something for its particular qualities, a way that it and only it excels, be this a people or an object. Seems to me that in the end that perfection lies not in the distillation of a particular element, but the homogeneity of the whole; something which exists only as the sum of all of its parts.

Through a striving for purity in Western culture, there has been a central idea of the triumph of the right - both in terms of morality and entitlement. We seek very definite reasons why someone deserves something, or why one person is more ‘correct’ than another. People are then pressured to be in the right, in order to be successful in society. That becomes a problem for a couple of reasons. For one thing, our species is everywhere. There are different cultures all over the world, all with varying ideas about what is right and good, which is all too apparent when it comes down to who is entitled to what.

That’s the obvious one, though. The less glaring, and yet easily more detrimental in the long run, is the dichotomy between those who will not waver from their opinion no matter what (even if they are ‘wrong’), and those who would rather remain associated with the opinions of the majority (better safe than sorry). Nowadays, we have a large number of people looking for the truth in places which are not necessarily the most reliable even if they are the most prominent. Western culture shrouds not its people, but itself, in its materialistic facade. It sounds like the tired argument of an aging rebel, but we have to realize how applicable it is to this very day, and even into the forseeable future, in order to do anything about it.

What we are missing is that homogeneity. We are getting closer to it, to be sure; the farther down we dig to break apart this universe into blocks separately responsible for every aspect of our reality, the closer we come to circling around and realizing that these independent pieces, without one another, are not. ‘Closer’ is, of course, relative. Who knows how long it will take us to reach that point, if we ever do. But I digress…

In a frame of mind where opinions are subject to change and reality is subject to the observing system (me), I find I can no longer afford to hold to any preconceived notion of myself - least of all to let it shape the discourse I share with the world at large. After all, I should be truly taking advantage of this advent of my era: unrestrained, instantaneous communication en masse. Why refine? Why spend ages reworking and picking away at my output, even after all the spelling mistakes have been fixed and everything is correctly punctuated, when there’s the chance that in this wide world one might stumble across it and find resonance with it just as it is? Why not, in a system expanding on into infinity with the useless and necessary in equal measure, just put things out there because I feel like it? To me, this is the ultimate personal contribution to that homogenous chaos: to loose the reins on my creative output and care not to perfect, to meet any set standard, but to truly satisfy myself and - potentially - someone else out there.

Therefore, we now return to our irregularly unscheduled programme.