I pass by the meadow every morning and cease not to wonder about the day that has yet to meet me in all of its glory and gloom. As I move along, I have these thoughts, most are intrusive to which I have not consented, and as they swoop in and make me live through the world that has been unthought of, I begin to ask myself the essence of my experiences.
Where do my experiences come from? How do I source them?
And how does it eventually culminate into an action and find a home to complete its loop.
Here’s an example to bring forth so I can draw it more clearly.
Take a sliver of just one conversation you have with anyone in your family. In my case I will take my teenage daughter. As I sit across the table with her and start using words to source my experience of that moment, I realize that the words that get tossed around, back and forth, will mean very little unless I can also own the grounding of that conversation. In that moment, not only do I have to unmoor and let go of my own epistemic plinth, but I will need to create a grounding upon which a teenager living through a postmodernist TikTok era could make sense and find meaning amidst the words being spoken.
Now, another one with my boss.
Here too, the words that are meant to communicate will pass or fail prolifically depending on the moorings of our epistemic grounding. For example, if I were living amidst the Romans and was one of the gladiators, the conversation with my boss would be bound around how I could entertain the audience in the colosseum by killing another human. I would live up to my highest aspirations if and only if I could intuit my way of hurting another human most abrasively and therefore, that would be the ground where all the words would find context and would win me accolades and promotions.
Fast forward to the last century and here I would find myself in the shoes of an Auschwitz prison engineer. Now, my aspirations would rise from designing the most effective gas chambers. My rewards would come from someone else’s death thusly offering me the incentive of the time.
But those were only a few examples and are not true to me here and now.
In fact, I live in a 21st century capitalistic society where consumerism and greed are the lifeblood and the truest essence of the time. Wars have ethics but capitalism doesn’t. And that grounding gives the context to the words we utter. The same grounding also defines if I am a success or a schmuck. For instance, if I worked for a company or a country selling mangoes, I would learn to deftly define the texture of the fruit so it could appear palatable to the consumer. My boss or my king would reward me based on how many mangoes were sold, and I would get promoted or reprimanded based on that grounding. Same would apply for a war that needed to be had or an election that needed to produce a certain outcome.
In all that has been spoken and said, here’s the worm that ails my heart profusely.
I know I live in a form, and I live through characters. However, I find myself nowhere in those forms or characters.
Neither this nor that.
I often find myself living within a contingent consciousness, something borrowed out of duress but not one iota reflecting my truest essence. I wake up to the day to run through a character. The premises are primed, and structures are in place. I walk the line, say the right words and tap carefully around another person’s feelings.
My wife, my kids, my colleagues, the fellow travelers in traffic, my boss, the waitress, the mailman, the loud neighbors and politicians. Every single one of them requires that I first find a grounding before I speak a word that can find meaning; that I first find the same rung of the ladder from whence words will snap on and create an orderly discourse of sense making. To be nice to another human at the behest of losing myself in that undertaking is what makes me humanely humble. It makes me likable. It makes me a hero.
However, such heroism comes at a price.
And the price, sadly, is giving in to the clamor of outside at the cost of inside.
