With, and without, reason

For those that live a joyous life without reason and never find it—those whose circumstances and emotional reactions to such circumstances consistently play in their favor throughout the course of their lives—may we celebrate them.

For those that live a miserable life without reason and never find it—those who are continually oppressed by circumstance and subjugated by their emotion—may we pity them.

For the rest of us who have found it, the choice between joy and misery—if there was ever a choice—is solely ours to make.

Farther away

Living our lives in a way that is aligned with the truth might mean that we are to live those lives always believing that we are farther away from it than we actually are.

To give up

In this society, we have a choice to become consumed by desire and become slaves to the drive of obsession, and we also have a choice to envelop our consciousness in a shroud of self-satisfaction and complacency. For many, the choice between the two is a choice between sanity and insanity, between joy and misery, between purpose and purposelessness.

But there may still come some momentous day where, regardless of what our choice was, we will be forced to give up—to give up our dreams and our passions, just as we might give up our luxuries and our comforts.

When we’re beckoned to do something far more exigent and pressing than anything we’ve ever done in our lives, will we heed to our calling?

Will we merely mourn the death of the status quo?

Or will we do something to make things better?

Loss

When I am at peace with the notion of death, why do I feel afraid of loss?

It seems that losing something—however better off we may be in long term without that thing—is somehow worse than literally losing everything.

Why do we choose to be friends?

Within the entire expanse of this planet,

Out of the billions of souls that inhabit it,

No other reason—but for the very fact that we have crossed paths.

Mindreading

Why should I be frustrated when I don’t know how someone truly feels or thinks?

Do I wish for a world where we could simply read each other’s minds? Where we spurn the very things that give our friendships and relationships stories to be told—this strange dance of dizzying possibility and wonder, of delicate progression and anticipation, of fateful discovery and revelation?

As we should not wish for suffering to end, we should not wish for convenience in our lives that we would be better off without. To go against the natural order of the human condition is pure folly.

No matter

No matter what I feel,

no matter how intensely these emotions torment me,

no matter where this heart tries to drag me,

All that I do will, under any circumstance, be done with genuine kindness, tenderness, intention, justice, empathy, and honesty.

And the moment that I deem one of these as violated?

I will give up, no matter how much is to be lost, and start over.

It’s not you—

it’s the idea of you.

When I don’t actually know anything about you, when there exists no reason whatsoever to believe that we are compatible at any level, when nothing has even happened between us, why the heavy heart? Why the gut-wrenching feeling? Why the incessant daydream?

Irrespective of reason, irrespective of how patently idiotic these feelings are, irrespective of how much sheer willpower I possess to resist this feeling, this weight on my heart persists. Nothing I do or say has any effect on how I feel whatsoever.

There mere anticipation of love—the momentous conception of the thought of possibility in this restless heart—however completely and utterly detached from any facet of reality, is enough to wreak such havoc in this mind of mine.

I didn’t choose to feel this way.

But perhaps the most confounding question of all:

If I did have a choice, would I still choose to feel this way about you?

To discern

To fall in love and find nothing—there exists no greater waste of time, energy, and attention.

But to fall in love and find love—there exists nothing quite as momentous, visceral, and irrevocably true.

And I speak as if I had a choice between them—as if any semblance of reason survived to discern which is which.

Here I am, again.

Here I am, again, on the brink of falling in love.

How peculiar—this normative state of mind that I now have, this acute self-awareness, this ability to at any moment detach, however momentarily, from the chains of my present circumstances. But it seems I am still consigned to the same helpless predisposition—an irreversible, frenetic spiraling of my emotions into utter chaos, impelled by quixotic tendencies and an undeniable, ravenous desperation for love.

Compared to my past self, while I think vastly differently, it’s not as if I feel any differently. It’s only now that I feel in my rational mind as if I’m an innocent bystander to this chaos, witnessing the storm brewing in the distance. Do I view it with disdain or with awe? With contempt or with appreciation? With fear or with hope?

But no matter what I think, no matter how much I try to reason with this insolent and tumultuous heart, I will never prevent the unpreventable. Despite how much I think that I’ve changed, how much that my mind has garnered a sense of resilience, I will nevertheless become helplessly stranded amid this raging ocean, swallowed by this sea, and the feeble comfort of this rationality—viciously wrested from my consciousness by the inexorable pull of this whirlpool of emotion.