Hypothetical Reasoning

One of my favorite Professors, Prof Laywine, once expressed that her favorite type of reasoning is hypothetical. Hypothetical reasoning are thought experiments, stories we create as models of reality in order to draw out some principle of nature. Her husband, Prof. Menn also enjoyed drawing truth by challenging and engaging with sophistries that uniquely abstract from the natural order of things by means of logical or linguistic gymnastics. We can learn alot about what the world mysteriously is by first stripping it of what it is not. Prof. Laywine warned however, of the dangers of hypothetical reasoning that deprats from the emotional matter of our real lives. When I’m washing the dishes and my mind is looking for something to do, if I use my imagination to give life to the emotional matter of my life, especially when life isn't happening at the beat of my imagination, I’ll end up suffering as much in my imagination as I do in my real life. If I begin hypothetically reasoning about the matters of my life, not only will I drown in ‘what ifs’ but I’ll create an active resistance against circumstances that have neither happened yet, nor will happen according to my expectations. Our anxieties are hypothesized threats, a ‘what if’ we creat around a pre-existing fear. What ifs can offer hopeful solace in harsh times, but when hope becomes a distraction from our acclimation to these times, hope can become a dangerous obstacle between us and our experiences of the world. Fear of our future’s uncertainty will have us cling to expected outcomes in our experience. We think this brings us closer to what we desire but in fact it drives us apart. Attachment to the outcome of a situation will limit our ability to engage with the novelty of the actual situation once it arrives.

Rain or Reign

Over the last few tears I’ve befriended a kind soul named Stephen. Every night Stephen finds a new bed and on sunny days he borrows a guitar from a pawn shop on Saint Catherine. He likes to take it up to Mont Royal and serenade the city. He plays beautifully and his melodies have mended my broken heart on more than one occasion. He told me once that every name has at least two meanings, two sides of the same coin, a dark side and a light side, and it's up to each of us to choose what our names will mean. I told him that غياث comes from the root غيث which means 'rain'. Thats when he asked if I spelled it rain or reign when I imagine my role in this world. When Obi-Wan Kenobi tested Anakin’s potential for connecting and moving with the force, he found a count of over 20,000 midichlorians, Which is NUTZ! This count of greatness was accompanied with a warning that is often given to heroes and real life people alike: It’s not enough to be a great person, we must strive to be good as well. Where we take our gifts, how we relate to the world, to our selves, to transient suffering , misfortune, to love & joy, makes the world of difference in whether we end up as Darth Vader or the freakin legend that destroyed the Death Star. I can't say for sure if my rain will grow flowers or will reign in terror. It's because I have a well lived heart that I can’t delude myself into taking up some rigid and unmoving trait of goodness that my imperfect humanity precludes. I can’t hide behind heaven’s gates when I’m far from done living, making mistakes and learning from them. The self-righteous cast their stones and hide their hand from themselves, they seek forgiveness in prayer with no intention of change. It’s because I have a loving heart that I accept the suffering of this world, the cycles of hurting because of the world, and hurting it back; I accept it but choose to break the wheel that distracts our minds from the fact that when we suffer, we all suffer together. We all love together too. This world shares a heart beat and I want to honor that.

The Ocean is a Wonderful Place

I went to the beach with my Mom and she told that the waves clean our spirit, they recalibrate our energy, something about our body being made up of water. Surely enough, as I floated in the Mediterranean sea, I could feel the waves work through the creaks of my heart and mind. How do you find stillness when you're surrounded by a body of water rising and crashing, pushing and pulling? You surrender to the currents. It's counterintuitive but when you tense your body up and resist the current, you'll swallow more salt than you could possible want. When you surrender to the ocean, when you let your body be moved by the waves, you'll effortlessly rise and fall with the ocean, you'll let the waves move through you. In the middle of a loud and moving world, in a life that won't stop living, if you stand in the way of the currents you'll create resistance between you and your experience that squanders energy unnecessarily, and holds you back from working with the circumstances you have no control over. You do however, have control over how you perceive and engage with these circumstances. Sometimes the ocean leads us exactly where we need to go, so we surrender; other times it leads us far from shore when we take surrender to mean passively accepting our roles as cogs in a machine or wave in an ocean. It's one thing to be a floating piece of drifting debris, it's another to be consciously aware yet nervetheless embrasive of the natural flow of the world around us. Sometimes its enough to rest patiently, to look up at the clouds and listen, to wonder about how the ocean moves as one, how it doesn't discriminate between a single wave and the next in the grand chain of waves circling the globe, all touching one another, pushing and pulling, crushing, dipping and cresting into one another, wandering if the sea has a spirit of its own.

My Mom told me that the ocean hears what your heart tells it, how it will respond to your love or frustrations in kind, or maybe embrace and heal you either way. That sounds nice but I wonder if nature lives and breaths without its creatures and plants to live and breath for it. If the depths of the ocean were to swallow me would the sand batt an eye? I don't know, but maybe the fish would enjoy the view, or the extra food hahaha. Other times we have to swim back to shore, find land again, rest, even then swimming with the waves, surrendering to their pull and launching as they push you ashore is far more graceful and effortless than working against the forces of nature.

I drifted to the side of the beach we were staying at, probably because the wind was flowing from the west to the east. I remembered a useful lesson, when you run towards something, ask yourself what it is you're running from. I ran for the cover of fantastical love, turns out I was running from falling in love with Myself. Even if you're just blowing towards something, asking ourselves honestly where we're blowing from can tell us alot about ourselves, put our lives in historical context. I felt a reluctant but moving urge to help a young lady of 24 to figure out whether marrying her 59 year old boyfriend was a good idea. The point of departure was a deep, unrequited sense of empathy held for a stranger. I have an unexplainable connection to the wellbeing of the living world. For me it feels inseparable from my own wellbeing, despite my detachment from the certainty or rigidity of a set outcome. Strangers we meet for a reason before going off on our own way, friends who open up in need of an empathetic ear, even animals who have been bruised in a bird cage. Call it selfish communal narcissism, call it a self-righteous superman syndrome, but I feel a need to love, heal with and help others however I can. Not to relieve some sense of guilt, or affirm some delusion of goodness that my help never really ensures, some title or identity I must cling onto, but because whether I want to or not, I feel a deep, human, and instinctive inclination to suffer and heal with the world; to do what I can if I can, when I can, to give way to the natural process of pressure and relief.

I sat on the beach and examined the coolest rocks I could find, Tried making a stone hedge thing with them but the ocean kept dragging the rocks away. I thought there was a certain kind of beauty and necessity to creating art that is neither meant to be immortalized nor publicized, art that was created with the sole intent of creation, that existed in beauty even if just for a moment, before the waves washed it away and gave way to something new. Before the ocean cleansed the sand for new generations of rocks. I wondered why I picked these rocks. If it was to be the king of the rocks, I'm sure the rocks wouldn't have noticed. My kingship would be a fragment of numerical imagination, secured only by a tally of rocks I have collected and sworn fielty to. How silly it is to collect rocks in a snow-globe, owning and imprisoning what can only ever end up owning an imprisoning us. Was it because I was adamant on finding the 'most beautiful' rock? I'd be a fool to believe the rock I found to be most beautiful had to hold a claim of objective beauty. My preferences don't downgrade the beauty of other things, nor are they supposed to be corroborated by the masses to be beauiful in my eyes. It's quite bizarre noticing how personal and self-anchored our voices are, that who we are needs neither to be actual (yet) not observed by others to be real. There are whole world in each of us, and only we hold the keys.