Because today the majority of my conversation will be with myself, as it is on most other days, I am typing out words I might use if I was having a conversation with someone else, or perhaps myself pulled out and standing corporeal before me instead of somewhere behind my eyes and up a bit.
I am floating the idea that some of we who swim in turbulent waters of bone-rattling thought are inherently repellent of conversation with individuated others. Who are Others but other versions of personality wandering about the CGI of our reality pretending to be human just as I am. We (the some above-mentioned) word ourselves differently for a start, using personally meaningful vocabulary shared by few others. This puts people off engaging, I would say. They (the thinker of more common topics) don’t understand the purpose of the concepts which we others live inside of, and smell a trap of intellect which they are unwilling to test.
They don’t step into the word-scapes we create and broadcast, the stability of their Story depends on this aversion.
I ask myself often what good these concepts I live within serve other than to torment my interior and leave me unsuited for paddling in those large pools where humanity lives and builds its structures. Some of us are natural hermits, our words hitting the walls of silent caves, whilst crowds peer in on occasion, spy unintelligible symbols and continue on to the next village square.
Let me share with you verse 20 from the Tao Te Ching, by the enigmatic character named Lao Tsu. Historians and other experts can agree that the Tao Te Ching was written at least 2500 years ago. The words quoted below give me comfort as they are so familiar to me that I know I have whispered them to myself from my own psyche. They have emerged from the sound of my own soul and they perfectly speak into the world (and have done so for the past two and a half thousand years) the conclusions which I observed in my own small sum of 52 sun rotations.
Give up learning, and put an end to your troubles.
Is there a difference between yes and no?
Is there a difference between good and evil?
Must I fear what others fear? What nonsense!
Other people are contented, enjoying the sacrificial feast of the ox.
In spring some go to the park and climb the terrace,
But I alone am drifting, not knowing where I am.
Like a newborn babe before it learns to smile,
I am alone, without a place to go.
Others have more than they need, but I alone have nothing.
I am a fool. Oh, yes! I am confused.
Others are clear and bright,
But I alone am dim and weak.
Others are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
Oh, I drift like the waves of the sea,
Without direction, like the restless wind.
Everyone else is busy,
But I alone am aimless and without desire.
I am different.
I am nourished by the great mother.
~ Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching/Twenty
What else is there to find? What more to achieve? What more to unwrap from the meagre offering of existential mysteries which keep myself and many before or beside me equally contained?
To be human is to be bombarded with a recycling stream of lifepath choices, or to choose none of them and lay in some obscure glen with few roads in and no roads out; watching for similar minds in still pools disrupted minimally by our fingertips like Aspen leaves falling onto puddles.
Some of us are Here without being Here. Over years and decades we sample several life stories, thinking our efforts failed because we cannot find a story to agree with and live inside of. We watch others jog by, happy in the thought-medicating harvests of their life choices; be those harvests wreathed in relief or suffering, they are fully invested in existing as a part of that story.
What is there for those like myself? Do we find a peaceful rock ledge and sit there quietly doing and being nothing much at all, except for a placeholder for conscious intelligence – until the day we stop being human and step beyond the boundaries of some of those mysteries which plague the entirety of the time we are here? Is that even viable when you live inside a high-maintenance lifeform needing food, shelter and various other basics which demand labour and an ability to find a place inside a social story to attain?
In so many articles people are discussing the purpose of being alive as human, using logic and imagination to devise long lists of conclusions. I think many of us really do not have a place here, we don’t fit and human civilisation truly does not want us here; it is too busy pretending to be something whilst we are born without the ability to be lulled by its melodies into a Dreaming Life.
In the absence of the human-specific directive to be actively engaged in human endeavours there is – well, there is Nothing.
Nothing is its own kind of undefinable Something Else.
The only words I am finding to share with others like myself are;you are in a growing company.
Published on: The Nothing in Between, 11/02/2025
Photo by SK Yeong
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