We have all sorts of strange, small, arbitrary actions in everyday life. Strange scenes of pre determined social interaction, where you already know the answer to the question you’re about to be asked. “No, I don’t want a receipt, thank you”. When walking, one always walks with a purpose, one always has a destination in mind and regardless of the path they chose to take their eyes become blinkered as they strive towards their goal. We impose boundaries upon ourselves by creating a path from A to B which is a perfectly straight road, no detours, no twists or turns along the way. Are we so encompassed in fear that we dare not stray from the path we create and look into the infinite number of potential experiences that await us?
This life is ours alone, each alone, each individual. We have the ability to make it whatever we want, not only can we act physically but we can alter our perceptions as well. We can bend reality, whatever that is, on both the physical and mental plane. We’re God’s fucking children, and do you know what that makes us? God! Consequently we’re terrified, we’re seriously scared witless. So we construct safe little communities, friendship groups, networks of acquaintances. All made of a stockpile of people we deem to be good because they don’t judge us. I ask myself, should I really be making relationships based on other people’s judgment, or lack thereof? If I’m really happy in myself, living the life that I know I want to live, then why should the judgement of others, good or bad, be a factor in my life at all? That’s just the problem, I don’t know what I want my life to be and in the absence of this knowledge I’m unhappy. So if I don’t know what I want to change my life to, why should I change my life at all?
The irony comes with this; the only way to figure out what you want out of life, is to try it out. The reason we don’t know is because we’re so scared of everything around us. Ask yourself, out of everything in the universe what do I have knowledge about? What topics does my wisdom cover? If the universe is infinite then your answer will be closer to nothing then it will be to something. And amongst that tiny slither of knowledge you do have, how much of it is actual real truth? “Well nothing of course! Objective truth is impossible.” Then what of subjective truth, of all the wisdom you spout how much of it is your own? How much is grounded in real personal experience, where you were fully encapsulated in a moment, with no concept of past or presence, just complete awareness of the now? I know, for me at least, not much, not much at all.
I love to think about “being in the moment”, because I think that’s the only truth we’ll ever have. Those real, intense moments, where everything happens at a thousand miles per hour but when you tell the story it replays in slow motion. I think this is the greatest truth in life, listen to anyone tell a story about their own life, is it one of those stories where you look into their eyes and regardless of what their saying you can see that, for them, it’s one hundred percent true? These are the real moments in life.
In the film Waking Life, it’s called “the holy moment” and it’s something we should constantly be looking for. It’s something we should actively seek out and constantly try and be aware of, whilst at the same time being lost within it. Like really good sex. How do we find a holy moment? By letting ourselves drift off the path a little bit; speak to that stranger on the train, express a real opinion of yours to someone, stand up for yourself and speak up, throw yourself out into the immensely diverse aether that pervades this planet and wallow in it like a damn hippo.
I’m gonna try and dedicate some time to holy moments. To moments of simple but real interaction with all that’s around me. I will enjoy the tiniest pleasures of nature and find the most real of human emotions in the most abstract of places. What more is a movie scene then a moment filtered through the perception of profundity. Your whole life is profound if you choose to see it as such. And I figure that here, I will write about them. Here I will type up, document and digitise my own holy moments. More for fun than anything else, not to set an example, this is just an experiment. A way of getting myself to think about being lost in the moment, to push myself outside of my comfort zone and fulfil the tiniest bit of the lingering potential that haunts my waking life.
