A long ramble
Well, now. Here I am, overcome with the urge to write something, with no real idea what. I do have to say, before this gets going, that typing isn’t as satisfying as actually writing something. If you’ll forgive the obviousness of the statement, pen on paper always feels more real.
I’ve had a lot of thoughts bottled up lately. I haven’t written anything in a long time now, and some of the things that were dying to be written have died in the meantime. Others have been half-forgotten, so we’ll see if they bubble to the surface over the course of whatever it is this turns into. I don’t think I’ll get it all out before I’m interrupted. I can’t write with distractions around. Especially people. If people read it before it’s done, it never ends up seeming right.
Take two. This’ll mark the start of the second entry, and the beginning of my first topic of thought. What passed within that space was several days time, but to you, it seemed only a moment. Perhaps you were even forced to stop and reread part of it to make sure you hadn’t missed something. Whether you paused or not, you’re here now, so I’ll get on with this bit.
My topics are written down (I started leaving myself pointers after things started getting forgotten. You know when you’re sure you had something to say, and all you can remember was that you had to say something, but nothing about what it was? When that happened a few times, I wrote down some headlines to make sure that the rest got out. I always get left with this lingering feeling when I’ve had something to say, but haven’t been able to express it to others before it’s forgotten. With that rather long rationalization as to my taking of notes, I’ll continue with my regularly scheduled topic). I wrote them down in no particular order, though with them written down in no particular order, it seemed right to approach them in the order that they’re written down . Sadly, the earlier writings here have led me in a slightly different direction, so I’ll be approaching them in a slightly different order to the one written, not that that will have anything to do with how they turn out in the end. I’d like to congratulate anyone who’s still reading at this point. It’s only going to get worse from here.
The first thought train I’ve had concerns the passage of time. I’m sure that with all the build-up before this point, it will seem rather lackluster, but I’ll continue anyway. My thought was that time was not constant. It’s a simple enough idea, but the more I thought about it, the more and less sense it seemed to make. On the one hand, we assume that time is a constant, and that we move through it at a constant speed. On the other hand, no law that we’ve tried to impress upon the universe yet has proven absolute. We assume that time is just another dimension that we travel through. We travel through it and perceive it just like the other three dimensions that we believe we exist in.
An important thing to remember here is that dimensions are simply a method that human beings have created in order to structure their perceptions of the universe. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as it’s kept in mind that dimensions are nothing more than a human construct, and have no importance to the universe other than what we give them. I was thinking of traveling, and traveling through time.
The first thing someone thinks about when you mention time travel is moving back or forward to some other point in time. No one really thinks about the value of being able to travel to *right now*. I thought of time as a river, complete with alterations in speed, changes in course and little eddies and currents. If I think about time like that, then it’s easy to see how we, as things in the river, find it much easier to just follow along with the natural current, and not move back upstream. We just don’t have the strength to move back to a point in the river we’ve already been, but we have no trouble moving forward. Everyone’s capable of time travel, by the very nature of the way we exist. Then I remembered how I was taught to swim across a river if I ever found myself suddenly in one. To get to a safe point on the other shore, you don’t swim straight at it, or you’ll be swept downstream. And you can’t swim right into the current, or you’ll get tired and drown. So you swim at an angle to the shore, just into the current, and you’ll end up at exactly the same point on the other bank.
If you apply this idea to time travel, it could work in a strange sort of way. If we can learn not to defeat time, but to move with just enough resistance to it, we could travel from point A to point B in no time at all. You’d arrive at a distant star at exactly the moment you left, and though you’d crossed all that space, no time has passed. Distance without time.
The only downside of this that I can see is that without time, humans can’t function. How would we stop the travel once it began? If that moment became an infinity, with any distance able to be traversed, how would you know when to stop? It might not even be possible to pre-program anything automatic to stop you, since nothing we know of would be capable of movement or thought. You’d be lost in a moment, and only those still moving would be able to tell that you’d gone.
There’s one down. I’ve managed to get a good amount of time here without any distractions, so I’m charging through this much faster than I thought I’d manage. I think that I’ll move on to something else now, before anything gets the chance to interrupt me. Each of these topics should rightly have been its own post, but I just can’t find the time to write them all when they occur. When I do find time, I also find that it’s become a bit much to write in the time I’ve found. Maybe one day I’ll manage to get ahead and stay ahead. Maybe not though, and best not to waste too much of this time I’ve come across wondering what it would be like to have time with nothing to fill it. Onwards.
The first thought I’d had, though the second thought here, is an older one that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Recently though, I had another thought that melded quite nicely with the original thoughts from long ago. The topic of this train of thought was death.
Death, at least to me, is the end of all that a person is. They die, their body finally shuts down, and everything within it ceases to be. All your memories, all your experiences, and everything you’ve ever valued is, in that instant, wiped away forever. Perhaps you “live on” in the memories of others, but that can’t last long. In about a century, give or take, no one left alive will ever remember having met you, or know anything about you at all. With today’s modern technology, it’s possible that a video recording, or some shred of your voice will persist and outlast you, and I suppose that’s a fair bit more than any previous generation could expect. Still, the fact remains that you’ll be gone, and eventually, everything you ever were will be gone as well.
It’s not something people like to think about. They want to believe that their lives will matter, or that they don’t fade to nothing when death finally comes ‘round for them. But everyone dies, and everything fades away. You couldn’t possibly know the names of everyone who has ever lived, or even know one fact about a fraction of the people who’ve ever lived. We only matter in the span of decades that we exist.
This is nothing new, just old thoughts regurgitated again. Another thought occurred to me the other day though. It’s not a pleasant thought, and it does nothing to illuminate the rather nihilistic view I spoke of above. For a long time, I’ve wondered what life would be like without a conscience. It’s the ultimate “ends justify the means” scenario. If you could destroy your conscience through any means, then you could justify any means through which to achieve that goal, since, when you reached it, you wouldn’t care about anything you’d done on the way to get there. It’s a transcendental point, after which anything that came before is immaterial. At that point, you’re free, and you’ll never care about anything ever again.
The unpleasant thought I’d had that link these two ideas was comparing the death of a conscience to suicide. It’s another point, that, if reached, nullifies the value of anything that came before it. If you care enough about the goal to take that final step, then you will never regret that decision. In fact, you’d be incapable of regretting it. Suicide is not a step I’d ever want to take, but it struck me as interesting how similar the two ideas were. I see lacking a conscience as a liberating experience, yet I don’t attach that same positive feeling to suicide. I wonder how similar the two would be? A conscience holds you back, but at least you’re still free to experience.
This topic ended up a little stranger than I thought it would.
I think these things will get a little less philosophical, and a little more down to earth as they go on. For anyone still with me, I guess I lied earlier when I said it would only get worse.
The third thought I’d had occurred to me on a bus, in the rain. I’d had a shitty day and I was feeling kinda mellow and down. A moment later, I was surprised to find that I was enjoying feeling unhappy. I know everyone likes a bad mood now and again, but I wondered why it was a bad mood if it made me happier. I thought back and remembered feeling that way before, throughout high school, sometimes even in first year university. I had a hard time remembering any instances after that. As I thought about that, it struck me that this was the first time since then that I’d actually felt really lonely. Not just a little lonely, but actually isolated and totally alone. Strangely, feeling that way made me crack a smile and feel much better, just because I realized what it was I was feeling. I guess I like feeling lonely. I don’t have anything else to say here, so I’m going to leave it there, with the underdeveloped conclusion I’ve drawn.
The last topic (finally, I know) has two aspects to it. When I first say them, they’re going to sound deeper than they are, but I’m really not going to explore them at any depth. I’m just going to relate an anecdote, and my opinion, then leave it alone. The topics are love and trust.
The specific event that triggered my two-sided thought had to do with a friend of mine. It turns out she’s pregnant. It was planned, they’re married, and everything’s working out fine. The downside is that I don’t like her husband at all.
He’s never done anything wrong, and he’s never been anything but the perfect gentleman, but I can’t bring myself to like him. I get a vibe off of him that I’ve only gotten off of about a half dozen people in my life. One of those people is now in prison, and the others I’ve done my best to stay the hell away from. It’s like I can tell that how he acts around others is not how he acts naturally. Even though the two of them seem to be very much in love, I can’t make myself trust in their judgement. Something will go wrong. I know it, but there’s no way to prove it yet.
I seem to have trouble trusting the idea of true love in others. It likely stems from my trouble with trusting others with anything at all. You know, that seemed a lot less obvious when it was still in my head and not in writing. Oh well.
I do believe in love. I’ve even felt it before. I can even believe that some people are truly in love. Most times though, I just can’t trust it. I have to believe that it’s just temporary, or that they’re fooling themselves. I don’t know why that is. I can’t seem to get any more reason out of myself. I guess I’ll leave it there for now.
Well now, that didn’t go as badly as I thought it might. It’s all out for now, and I’m sure there will be more to come. If you’ve actually read it all, please comment. I want feedback on this stuff so I can think about it some more.