The Stream: 8.4.17

I am a definite article human. I’m not explaining what that means.

I’ve been thinking a lot…it’s kind of my general state of being, and I’ve wondered on many things. But recently, I’ve developed a fascination with the concept of trying.

Why do we try?

Why do we use the phrase “I’ll try”, instead of “I don’t want to disappoint you by pointing out I’m probably going to fail, so I’ll use an excuse that I put all the effort of which I was capable to make re you understand that failure is not my fault”.

I need to stop fucking trying.

I try way too hard, all the time. It’s fucking exhausting, and more than a little useless: do something, don’t do it, or fail to do it. Keep shit simple. Don’t try though.

Bukowski was a royally noxious shit, but he got that fucking write.

Cause let’s be honest, what are you really saying when you say “I’ll try”? Of course the above is implied, but you’re really lacking sufficient faith in yourself to get the job done.

And look, disappointing people is hard, and being decisive is difficult; and I am also ten kinds deep in this bullshit, but Yoda doesn’t say “Do or Do Not, there is no try” for no reason.

You either do it, or you don’t do it. You can take a long time, you can rush, you can patiently approach  the situation or jump in feet first and watch the water splash everyone. But trying is the quickest route to failure. And there’s a good reason for that: you’re lying to yourself, and your faithless.

Faithlessness is some bullshit. And I know plenty of skeptics, atheists and scientists who refuse to be faithful on the grounds that it is not empirically verifiable. Well, neither is reality, but we seem to ovelook that regularly.

In b4: but reality is verifable. No, it isn’t. If you use the logic of “You can’t put out a fire from inside a house” and the fire is falsifiability, and reality is the house…you’re not dumb. There is no control group for the real man. As Stew from Passing Strange quotes a hot dog vending motherfucker: the real is a concept only found in fiction.

But back to faithlesness et. al. There is usefulness to science; there is value to falsifiability. The collective agreement on a specific reality serves a valuable purpose. But it’s a shit substitute for faith.

Faith is vital to life, and not just religious life. You have to be able to live without all verifiable metrics being confirmed because hey, guess what, they can’t be. The human brain doesn’t have that kind of causal capacity. To exist without faith would require an understanding of reality down the last Down Quark in existence.

You can’t even imagine what 100 people in a room looks like accurately, and when you’re a baby, your brain is so underdeveloped you think people disappear when they hide their eyes. And those perceptual limits never really stop.

And yet, we’re able to make assumptions that don’t require acts of faith on a regular fucking basis. It’s astounding to me.

And, for the record, I’m not saying “Believe in God, hurr durr” because that’s fucking dumb: believe whatever modality of reality that tickles your sac in just the right way. It costs nothing to me if you believe that we ride a giant ass snake eating its own tale; that we descend from two humans; or that there 33 million deities with a variety of limbs, mirroring one true divinity beyond human ken. As long as you’re not a noxious single-minded prick about it, we’ll be square.

What I am saying is trust something outside of yourself. Trust that the universe is not only bigger than you, but also dramatically inconceivably older, and wiser. Trust that you are some insignificant speck on the backwoods of cosmic existence, and that, in the end, everything you believe to be true is not true, or not true in the way you think it is. Let the universe do what it needs to; its done it for as close to forever as human’s are capable of perceiving.

Because even if you don’t have faith in something divine, you have to have faith in  something, or else life is going to ten kinds of fuck you up.

Man, I’ve failed miserably with this post. Angry, and bitter sounding and impatient. How have I veered so far from my point?

Let’s rewind a second.

I’m not angry with you, theoretical person reading this. I can’t be. I love y’all. Yes, I do. I love you. You are a person. You are a universe unto yourself. You have aspirations and beliefs, and goals; you have blood coursing through every vein; you have a series of events following each other that make you human. I love you. I love all things.

But when you “Try”, when you don’t trust that things will be ok, you make yourself miserable. When you make doubt the flower and not the soil, you end up miserable.

Faith is a flower: it’s borne by doubt, and a lack of the whole picture. It is nourished by the water of trust, but it thrives in the manure of doubt. It reaches full bloom when you don’t know what’s going to happen next, and you’re scared of being wrong.

It’s more meaningful to have faith with doubt, because it means you chose to be positive. That doesn’t mean what you want will happen; or if it does, in the way you want it too. But if you don’t try, if you let yourself be vulnerable, terrified and scared of what happens next; but you trust it will work out for you. Often, I’ve found, the Universe is pretty cool with that.

I love you, fellow human, and I want you to succeed, and thrive…not just survive; and hate, anger and faithlessness won’t get you there.

This I know, because I just switched tracks recently, in the planck tapestry of existence. And I don’t always get what I want, or the way I want it.

But I always get what I need.

 

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