When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
At that point, I think I was going back and forth between being a paleontologist or a vet or an astronaut. 🤷♀️
Month: March 2024
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I find it funny how much emotion plays a role in how you perceive or experience certain things, and how that can change over time. This pertains specifically to music, at least in this moment for me.
I mentioned a TOOL song in something I wrote earlier, and I was inspired to listen to the entire album. I originally got this album when I was 15, and would listen to it over and over on my cheap Walkman knockoff with crap headphones. First and foremost, I’d just like to say that am thrilled that the portable listening experience is so improved from that time. Aside from that, it baffles me how the way you think of a song, or what it means to you, or how you feel listening to it can change over the years, and how life experiences can make you realize that what the song meant to you at that time is probably not what the artist intended, and certainly not at all what it means to you 20+ years later. It’s amazing how the lenses of emotion can color things in such different ways. That said, none of that matters because you had an emotional experience, evolving or not, and I believe that is the goal of any musician.
For example, the album Aenima. I have said before that this album saved my life a number of times, and I absolutely believe that. But, listening to it now is such a different experience. The song “Eulogy” has a great intro. Building layers of sound that start off crisp and light, becoming more and more complex, adding deeper tones gradually until it crashes into a rumbling bass and drum line that just picks you up and carries you off, complexities still lingering underneath. I probably listened to the first two minutes and 40 seconds of that song over and over hundreds of times when I first got the album, just to hear and understand all those different sounds. The acoustical intricacies of that song just called to me.
I think the reason those details resonated with me is because of my complex and chaotic emotional state at that time. The title of the song, and my clear obsession with it and the rest of the album caused some… tension. And rampant miscommunication. A friend of mine destroyed three different copies of the album because he thought that it was causing me to feel a certain way. But in reality, it was giving me something else to focus on, something that I could identify with so I didn’t feel quite so alone, and something that gave form to emotions that I couldn’t even put into words.
That is the power of music.
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I had two conversations recently that each, in their own way, sparked a chain of thoughts related to this series of ramblings. In the one conversation, the idea came up that humanity itself does not have a purpose. The idea that we, just like any other living thing on the planet, don’t necessarily have an overall purpose for our existence. We simply exist. But, at the same time, each individual person has not only the capacity, but also the responsibility to give themselves a purpose, and to define the meaning for their own life.
This idea fascinated me, because it addressed a question that I asked in a previous post about why human beings are special in that they have a purpose and other animals do not? What if we aren’t? What if we have no more purpose in the universe than the squirrel that eats all your birdseed? Or a random fish swimming in the river? And that what makes us different is the ability to assign a purpose to ourselves? And that if we feel that our lives do not have purpose, it’s because we haven’t fulfilled that responsibility to ourselves?
I thought a great deal about all this, and had come to the conclusion that if I had to assign a purpose to myself and my life, that purpose would be to learn things and to help others. I mentioned this to a friend of mine last night while sitting by a campfire. (Completely amazing thing to do, by the way, and highly recommended for those who are big on introspection and reflection!) He thought for a moment, and then said, “Well, I think that’s sorta everyone’s purpose. People in general want to help other people, and they learn things to be able to do that better. Some people are better at it than others, but yeah. I think that applies to everyone.”
That makes sense. There are schools of thought that say that we are all essentially beings of energy (our souls) that simply inhabit human form to gain that experience. Gonna throw in some relevant TOOL lyrics here, interestingly enough, from a song called Third Eye — “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves.” So, what if that actually is the case? What if the reason we are here is to learn – be that a specific thing or simply as much as we can – and to assist other people (souls) on their journey to do the same?
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All offspring become orphans, in most cases. It is the natural order of life, sad as it can be.
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I think humans have started to devolve as a species.
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Is deja-vu actually a hint that you’re on the right track?
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How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?
Historically? Rarely. But I am working on getting better with that. Because, as much as I don’t want to disappoint other people, or as much as I really want to do something other than focus on what needs to be done to achieve my goals, disappointing myself has a much bigger and longer lasting impact, and is certainly not outweighed by whatever short term pleasure I get from doing something else.
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Which is worse – uncertainty or regret?
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Our brains are mostly made up of fat. It’s basically a 3lb lump of fat inside our skulls with electrical wires running through it.
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It’s exhausting to put in the work required to change things for the better rather than to accept things as they are.
A Peculiar Cerebral Tangle 