stupid thought #1: this is a paradox. if you are really interested in someone/something (but usually someone), then it is probably best to practice disinterest. and if you are disinterested (or even feel antipathy) towards someone/something, it's probably best to practice being interested. this is why i think it works (we'll leave it up to you all to decide via experience whether it does or not): it is a fake still point. there is no real or authentic still point in the world we live in, because we're living IN it. everything in this world is in flux and motion. but if we feel a motivation (either towards or away from something), and if we counter that motivation, we "spin" ourselves and cancel our original momentum, such that we "approximate" stillness. from that perspective, we are better able to appreciate our situation... also, and here's a related paradox, something that i've come to believe in (again, you all likely have different experiences): if you stay still, really stay still, then the universe kind of falls into place (debates about what that means ["staying still", "falling into place"] notwithstanding).
stupid thought #2: i was thinking about things in terms of calculus, taking differentials. now, i'm not a math person by any means. i think i got through calculus purely by guesses between naps... but i kinda understood differentials. differentials are sort of an abstraction of information. example: on the concrete level, you have position. then, you have a change of position over time: velocity. next, you have changes in velocity over time: acceleration. and so on.
if you're driving in traffic, you've probably encountered this phenomenon. if you're really impatient and not particularly perceptive, then you operate on a more or less concrete level and judge the traffic more or less by the position of the cars. for example, if you're in a lane tailgating a car, and you see that the adjacent lane has "space" because the car there is further ahead, you would change lanes. sometimes this may work. but what if the car in your original lane was actually traveling faster than the car in the adjacent lane? in this case, it would be better to stay in your lane, because despite the seemingly poor positioning, due to differences in velocity, you'd probably pass the car in the next lane by just staying where you are...
it's a matter of "seeing" other levels of information, of, to use calculus terminology (likely improperly) taking differentials. by seeing on a "higher level," you can seemingly predict the future, because you can see "tendencies."
then again, the concrete level always has the final say... for example, you might "predict" anything you want based on what you perceive of the velocity of the cars around you, but at any given moment, any of those cars could suddenly slam on the brakes, or swerve out of control... and then, all of your predictions about which lane would be best to stay in sort of gets thrown out the window (maybe literally), and it's every car for itself...
stupid thought #3: it's been said before. the beginning is similar to the end. all babies tend to look alike, and all old people tend to look alike. sure, the beginning doesn't look like the end, but it mimics/repeats it in its, well, anonymity.
i tend to look upon life as some sort of sine wave. in youth, we're always accelerating towards "maturity," and in old age, after our motivations escape us, we feel ourselves accelerating towards the end. but in between, at this ambiguous mid life period, things have the illusion of staying still (refer back to stupid thought #1) because the deceleration INTO maturity and the acceleration out of it both cancel each other out. and at that stillpoint, we appear to have a "privileged perspective" of how high we are, and how strange that height is, and how weird where we are is, especially compared to where we come from, and where we are going. there is, i think, an icarian headiness about mid-life (this is why i like the icarus myth so much). you've somehow reached this place in the mid-skies; you've somehow acquired a perspective... why, oh why can't it remain this way forever, when it seems, for the first time, that the world makes sense!?
but no, it's our destiny to fly too high, and to have our "clear sight" taken away in a dizzying tailspin into the sea...
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