2024-05-27 Journal Entry

Created: May 28, 2024 6:05 AM Tags: Daily

This is my morning pages happening actually in the evening just as a way to get the juices flowing. I have this obnoxious intent to write, but I’m really not sure about what.

I want to write something about happiness, which is ironic given that I don’t identify myself as a particularly happy person. One thing that I do think I’m good at, though, is identifying when I’m happy. That comes at the expense at struggling to be able to reliably get back into those states when I’m not happy — well, more on that later — but generally speaking on many days I’m just sort of meh and don’t have particularly strong emotional reactions to many things.

When I am happy though, I feel like I’m fairly adept at being in the appreciation mode. When I’m happy, I can melt away into the experience of a thing. That’s something that’s so surprising about being happy, about knowing something deeply: it involves becoming that thing; it involves dropping any irony, detachment, or self-consciousness. When you’re most happy, your laugh is just that little bit louder, your smile just a bit louder, and you’re certainly not thinking about how your hair looks right now.

Back in the 19th century, talking about magnificence felt more commonplace — the sublime, the surreal, mythology, spirits, all of these felt like topics that were on the table. In the first half of the twentieth century, we traded much of that out for being “not real” and instead opted for the commonplace. To some degree these two are the same, for those who’ve sufficiently mastered some spiritual tradition perhaps, but for most of us, this was probably an unfortunate state of affairs.

One thing that feels like it never really occurs to me is to think of better worlds. Sometimes I’m tired of the world as it is and I feel like I can so clearly see another world out there, and I should capture that.

I can see this world in the mountains. Two young boys lay crouched in the tall grass beside the river, spear sharpened to catch a frog sitting unaware under a miniature waterfall. The frog’s eyes are closed; one imagines him at the height of bliss. An old man…

What are all of my desires? Brain dump then stack rank them. Pick the top 3 and get to it.

You can just make new worlds. You can poke and prod at them, change them. What if there’s green and blue and trees and salamanders. What if there weren’t people but at least spirits. Memories, maybe. Memories all exist out in their own universe, their life and ours an unfortunate overlap. A world war in memories is someone getting alzheimers. The death of a man a tsunami over the memorly.

The real world except more real. Our world as the source. There is no going back to the source, we are the source. The source is us. Duality is empty because it means dissolving the one. The one is not one because within it there are two.

I always think of the myth of Sisyphus in a weird modernist way, where the mountain is a pure straight triangle, the boulder a pure sphere. In reality, he probably went down a windy ridge or had to dodge a fallen beehive. He often had to pick worms out from his toes.