Hunter (x) Hunter

Suffering rarely hunts alone and partners with other hardships. Lack of sleep, sorrow, solitude and sickness are often seen in this disastrous pack, trying to take down the victim with their infinitely sharp fangs and claws, shredding through metaphysical flesh and bone of those which have the capacity for feeling. It is interesting to note that their hunting is not an easy task. Most victims do not fall down easily before these psychological overweights - but they do fall down eventually. 

When I was a kid, I used to fall down pretty quickly, to the point, I thought, of no return. You cannot turn a psychologically-damaged kid into a fighter, I thought. I am what I am, I do not remember ever being any other way - I do not remember not being a perfect prey for hardships in life. I will probably grief until my physical life is over - then, if there is not afterlife, I might get some rest.

Today, things are different. I have been through my fair share of suffering in the last months. Lack of sleep goes for my neck, solitude tries to drag me to the floor and suffering hits me in the stomach so hard I go to sleep and then wake up feeling sick.

However, something changed in me which I cannot fully describe. One one hand, these hunters do not bother me so much anymore. Their wounds still hurt as if I was in hell - but now I know I am not in hell. I never was. If I was in hell, suffering and sorrow would be obsolete - they would probably leave out of boredom because I would have nothing on which they can feed themselves. 

If I was in hell, I would be dead inside and still living.

Yet, I have never felt so alive inside. There is something in me that screams for more, which I do not know what it is. More of what I am right now. More of what I can deal with - and it feels so good. I am suffering and paradoxically I have never been happier. These days are, if anything, the most interesting days of my life.

I feel no fear of whatever is coming. I know I will take it face-to-face with hard will. I know I will not bow down to what the world expects of me - to fall down on my knees when I am struck with grief and shut down my feelings so that I can take the bites and live another day. To separate myself from the external world and avoid risks at all costs - even if it means hurting someone I care for. To lie to myself about what I might have done wrong because I cannot take it that I made a mistake. To hang on to someone in hope that the flesh of us combined will be enough to feed the hunters. 

No! I will take none of it - I will drink not a drop of it - of weakness.

Weakness is the price you pay for an easy, short-sighted route to escape suffering. 

I have taken what little I liked about me as a kid - my sensibility, my intelligence - and taken on the world when it challenges me, without falling into the traps of life hardships that so much of us fall for - without weakness as means for survival. I finally feel that I am on my own shoes, after years and years of trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

Now, it is almost as if I am enjoying the journey and the challenge of being alive. I have not reached any point at which I cannot handle the world because I am sick of it - I have reached the opposite point, at which I am ready to take anything and I love the adventure.

So yes, I feel awful;

but yes, I feel awesome.

I am still prey to the hunters. 

What I am not, is a victim to the hardships that are trying to eat me away.

I think that is because I am myself searching for something. I am a hunter in a certain sense (as all of us are). I am a hunter for more. I don't know what more is, but I have a feeling I will never get to it - and I also don't want to. If I get to more and I eat it away, there is no more.

...

The sun is not shining today - outside, that is.

Bird's Eye View XIII

What makes sex a wonderful experience is not the ephemeral pleasure one gets during the intimate moment, but what it reveals about what it means to be human. The veil of rationality falls to the ethereal floor, revealing the utter nakedness of the being underneath.

This unveiled nature is weak, because it is not in control of itself.
This discovered nature is powerless, because it surrenders to pure feeling.
This wild nature is feeble, because it lets itself sink into gasps, appeals and screams.

Two souls that have shared their nakedness with each other create a strong bond made of their mutual weakness.

The Game of Life for 2 Players.

|| Obstacles are walls in the game of life. You've finally reached a wall that you cannot destroy. ||

A relationship is a soup of feelings and experiences: love, partnership, fun, pleasure and sorrow. Different soups have different quantities of each ingredient, but they all have one thing in common - they all die. Their death comes either before or after people die - generally before.

So what makes it good?

What makes it good is what makes everything else in life good - the experience is worthwhile in its finite duration. It is good while it lasts.

Right? It makes sense. Except it is wrong - as wrong as could be.

What makes it good goes beyond the duration of any relationship. 

A relationship is an opportunity to expose your own faults as a human being. The true treasure that all relationships can provide - even the ones who die off early - is the opportunity for any person with self-awareness and drive to spot and improve as a person.

If you are a jealous person and that fact is damaging your relationship, it's your own fault - not your partner's fault, not the fault of both. This is often a serious problem, because people lack the courage, honesty and maturity to see it for what it is; it hurts that the problem is with them and not with the world around them. Realizing that jealousy almost always sprouts from insecurity and lack of self-confidence and should be improved upon by yourself, for yourself is itself a great reward that is not taken by many jealous people during and after their relationships.

A relationship is the game of life, now being played by two intimate, close players. They have to cooperate, help each other, learn from experience, be courageous and overcome obstacles or see their partnership die a slow, agonizing death.

For those ever-thristing souls, for those minds aiming for the high skies of consciousness and happiness - this is often what a relationship can bring to the table, independently of its duration. 

My self-love and strength were unburied after my first relationship. My happiness and confidence were unburied by my last relationship. Specially for the last, I am truly, wholly grateful.

|| I will go back and gather the debris from all the other walls and jump over this one. So goes the game we call life. ||

Contemplação Aritmética

Se contemplar por uma dia,

Aquilo que fui há uma hora,

Encontro uma barca vazia,

Onde viajei, outrora.

Se observar por uma hora,

Aquilo que fui há um minuto,

Encontro um nada que chora,

Por um qualquer defunto.

Se reflectir por um minuto,

Naquilo que fui há um segundo,

Encontro um vácuo profundo,

Restos de outro mundo.

Seja qual for o intervalo,

Infinitesimamente existente,

A contemplação irá cortá-lo, 

Até a mudança ser aparente.

Seja que espaço-tempo for,
A reflexão desembainha a espada,
E com um golpe indolor,
A realidade converge em nada.

Change

The "Ship of Theseus" is a thought experiment which raises the question of whether a ship who has been on a journey and got its pieces replaced, one by one, is still the same ship at the end of the journey. Although originally posed as a philosophical dilemma, it beautifully illustrates how we perceive life and change.

If I am on a journey - call it life, our most important (and perhaps only) journey through space and time - and got my cells replaced one by one or my organs and bones morphed into larger ones, am I still the same person after some amount of time? 

Posed this way, it seems obvious that "The Ship of Theseus" can be in the analyzed in a new light - that of a person growing and changing, both physically and psychologically, throughout her life. If Mary takes a picture of herself each second, from birth to death and analyzes them with care, she would probably not notice any difference. To make this less boring, let's take a picture of her personality too (whatever the meaning of it is). Every photo after 1 second has passed looks almost exactly the same to her when compared to the second before. By applying this reasoning to all photos, without ever looking back to photos from seconds past, she would get to the end and notice no different at all - did she never change with time? She knows (and we know) that she must be wrong; when she looks at the photos from birth, its unmistakable that a huge change has occured, both in her physical attributes and in her way of being - all that makes her Her.

Has she done something wrong in her analysis? One could argue that because we are not perceptive enough, we cannot notice the changes that happened during that second. But the fact is, we never could have - if we take this reasoning to the extreme, every electron that moves inside each atom that constitutes each cell that composes Amy will give rise to a change which we could never notice due to quantum nature of matter. We would never be able to see the effect that each electron in an atom produces - only, after some time, the effect of what many, many atoms gave birth to.

So more than being stuck with imperfection, (which, of course, we already knew), it seems inevitable. It appears that if we are constantly looking at ourselves, both physically and mentally, change never happens.

My answer for this apparent dilemma - the ship of theseus or the ship of life - is that in each second Mary looks at herself, she redefines itself in that moment. What we called "Mary" one second before is now updated to "Mary" one second after. Every time a piece of the boat is replaced, we update our concept of "this ship" - even if the change is not noticeable. So the ship is the same in the eyes of a sailor aboard the ship, but not necessarily the same for someone who only got the see the ship leave and then arrive at a later moment.

This is why change is so difficult, or almost impossible, if we are always looking ourselves in the mirror to see our body and personality - it seems that we have not changed at all; that we failed in growing, in evolving, in getting better. On the other extreme, someone who never looks back can never appreciate the beauty of our own perception; can never contemplate how much she sailed through the tides of time.

Every now and then, it's a good thing to look back and dive into the pool of memories of what we were; to look at the night sky and watch the light of a dying star which we know does not exist anymore.