Free Flowing Ruminations on Time or the Lack Thereof

I am challenging myself this Saturday morning, as the cold seeps into the bones of my old house, to write a stream of consciousness piece explaining my experience of time.

Saturday, in the dead of winter, is an appropriate day to reflect as such. It is, after all, the literal day of Saturn. For anyone who's curious: Sunday is Sun Day, Monday is Moon Day, Tuesday harkens back to Mars, Wednesday to Mercury, Thursday to Jupiter, Friday to Venus. I didn't make this stuff up. It's a shared history, though admittedly force-fed to us by the Romans.

If I were to listen to various commentators on my life, all of whom conspicuously had something to gain from triangulating me into such, I might be rife for diagnoses of a dozen modern psychopathologies. I might be autistic. I might have ADHD. I might be Schizoid disordered. I might, I might, I might, etc., etc., etc.

I reject it all. I've said elsewhere, however, that there's no shame in seeking help, though I think everyone by now understands that when you pay for something, it's certain that you're engaging with a business first and a service second.

That some wonderful human beings in those professions still have the moral compass to care more about adequately providing that service than making money is a cause for hope, and I hope that whoever or where ever you are, if you take recourse with such, that you found such a one.

But for me, I am too much a loner and a lover of my own mind to allow it to be transmogrified by either cultural conditioning or professional poking and prodding.

One thing I have definitely noticed in my long view of our short (relative to the cosmos) human history is this:

The definition of normal changes from generation to generation but the definition of dysfunction remains that which is not considered normal.

I am certain, in my own right, that I am doing the right thing, but I am also certain that free will, or volition, is the foundation of dignity, and that it is not for me to advise another in such matters, as it pertains to themselves.

Would you look at the time?

One might think I have strayed from the point, but I just made it. This twisting and turning through the channels of my own thoughts, which range from consideration of the immediate to the farthest stretches of time and space which my mind can bear, is how I spend, and enjoy, most of my time.

I'm not a social person. Though I can be quite sociable, it is hard, draining work for me. Whereas for most people, socialization confers an immediate benefit that justifies the cost, for me, the cost-benefit analysis never adds up in my favor.

Forty-six years on this earth is plenty of time for me to have figured this out, but those who belong to the hive or the herd or the pack will swear up and down, again, that this is just a psychological abberation.

How many square pegs will we mutilate before we run out of round holes?

I look into the lives of others like myself and I see beneath the surface of their mania, their ecstasies, their diatribes, their exegeses, a similar experience to my own.

I note, not without satisfaction, but not without sorrow, that these great minds have all changed the world in some or another significant way, despite many of them being unappreciated or even reviled during their lifetimes.

I also suppose that there were many more whose names and work I will never know.

Does the mystic in the cave on the mountain or the wise woman in the woods change reality in ways of which we are unaware?

I am certain now that they do, but I am also certain that to aspire to such for its own sake would be a crash course in madness, the worst kind, so I do not recommend.

My foray from the drudgery of factory labor into putting my work out there started with an essay I wrote on Percy Shelley's A Defense of Poetry, which you can find here.

It is more and more in my relative solitude that I come to understand what Shelley meant when he said "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

And on that subject, I plan to say no more, except to remark that it will be my pleasure to thus pass the time, even if only in my own mind. That it will bring me peace, and that I wish also that each and every one of you find the same, in whatever way best suits you.

That there be volition of will, love in our hearts, peace in our minds, and change for the better, these are the only causes I ever found worth living or dying for.

So Mote It Be!