A Product of the System

From a macroscopic viewpoint, all of us belong in a category. We have jobs or other duties that we repeat and are quantifiable...

[Let me take a break here from this so-called serious review of humanity, which is nothing particularly new, to speak to myself:

Rick, what's the point of all this chattering? Do you just like to hear yourself think out loud? What are you trying to accomplish?

"Well, Rick, I'm glad you asked. Basically, I'm sitting here trying to justify my existence, because I don't want to sit here and let my thoughts run idly, even though I know in the big picture it doesn't matter whether I sat here and wrote or picked my fingernails. I have more money than I need (although the current economic conditions do put pressure on the definition of "need"). I have nothing that I want or want to do so I'm testing out theories of human behaviour and reading about scientific studies, in case I discover something worth needing, wanting, or wanting to do."

I see. So you're telling me there's not at least one other person you'd like to spend time with?

"No, I'm not. I enjoy time with my wife, even though a part of me constantly compares time I spend with my wife against time I could spend with someone else, a condition I have no matter who spends time with me. I'm always asking myself, 'Is there more than this?'"

A common condition we all have, although some have overcome this human knack and truly accept their place in the moment. "If you're not with the one you love, love the one you're with."

"Yeah, yeah, I get that. I have moments of oneness."

But not all the time, right?

"Exactly."

And perhaps you think you could live in the moment all the time, only if...

"I think so. I'm not sure. I believe that we only have a sense of those clear, lucid, here-and-now moments because we don't live in the moment all the time."

You 'believe'...

"Okay, I get the sarcasm in your tone of voice. Belief, faith, and all that is a concept I play with. I believe the path underneath my feet is sitting still so I can safely make my next step, even though the path is rapidly spinning around an axis, hurtling around the Sun and flowing around a galaxy that is itself in motion."

I see. So you carry two thoughts in your head at once - "I'm going to take a step" and "I'd take a step but first I have to calculate where two bodies in motion will simultaneously meet except I don't carry a good calculator or set of planetary body motion equations in my head so I better just stand here." Am I right?

"Pretty much."

And that's why you're sitting there right now, waiting to take your next move until you find out what your DNA and brain chemistry/real estate were most ideally designed for making you move?

"Precisely."

Hmm. And meanwhile, new adventures are being missed, ones in which your non-ideal actions could participate?

"Uh-huh."

And you do realize that this is the only body you'll ever have, right? Your body's aging, whether you wish it to or not. What if it takes 50 years of scientific research for you to find out you were supposed to be the world's greatest tree climber at age 47, if you'd only spent time today lifting weights and learning techniques from tree climbers?

"I suppose I'd miss out on that."

Precisely.

"But you're assuming I have precognition, which I don't. So how am I supposed to know to get up from this keyboard and work on tree-climbing techniques?"

You don't. You experiment physically, interacting with the rest of your kind, actually making mistakes and learning from them.

"Making mistakes physically, in front of other people?"

Yep.

"OMG. The world's coming to an end! LOL"

See, you're laughing at yourself in front of the whole Internet. That's a good thing. No need to pretend to speak from an authoritative position about humanity.

"Thanks. I guess I needed that."

Yes, you did. You can go back to your original blog entry subject, if you want. I think my split-self conversational technique has worked - my job is done here.]

But do all of us want to know that we fit in categories? I don't know. I've approached this subject before. Every time I think about being in a category (or categories), I cringe. I remember a radio interview with a guy who'd just bought a bottle of "rare, vintage" wine in an out-of-the-way shop only to find out he was part of a trend of people buying the same bottle of wine in shops all around the world -- he was devastated to hear that he was trendy, thinking that he'd discovered the wine all by himself, not realizing that zeitgeist trends influence us unknowingly.

We all are part of one system or another, biospherically speaking or macroeconomically speaking. Because we are part of a system, there are others who observe the component parts of that system and make studies or judgments on which others may make fair trade agreements with humans in or out of that system. For instance, the birds outside my window see me walk to the back of the house and open a door, assuming that my purpose is to fill the birdfeeders in the backyard. They trade their apprehension of other animals for a chance that I and the food I provide will not harm them -- we build a mutual understanding with one another, even though we don't read each other's minds or speak the same verbal language. At the same time, birdseed companies bank on this behaviour of mine to bargain with crop owners on the price of seed, with everyone in the transaction subject to the vagaries of weather.

By sitting here, I support one system over another, the world of technology versus the natural world, digging up new facts about human behaviour discovered and reported by the scientific community versus sitting on a rock and watching a wasp caught in a spider's web grab the spider and sting it to death while caught forever in the web until I decided to free the wasp to go on its way yesterday evening (it looked something like this or this (Arachnospila genus) and was perhaps attempting to lay an egg in the spider and got caught in the web in the process).

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Thanks goes to Allison Gregg in her 11th June 2009 Party of One column in Valley Planet for the idea for this blog entry, mixing her "Note to Self" format with my version of the split-self conversation style of Ken Nordine's old "Word Jazz" radio program I listened to decades ago.