A Better World
I am unsatisfied with the default way we have been taught to view the world. I need to believe in something better, something more. I began this project to decide for myself what a meaningful life looks like. A Better World is an ongoing series exploring and reimagining the different aspects of life, with the goal of spending our days more thoughtfully, and with the purpose of making our tomorrows closer to our dreams of utopia.
Suicide
There's only two serious philosophical questions: why do people commit suicide? & why haven't you yet? I'm trying to figure out what makes someone look at this world and this life and decide they're done. Like love, life is a choice, but so is the absence of life or transcendence from it. To move on and end the human experiment. I have never been suicidal, but I have been depressed, where I looked at my life and felt that I lost everything I was working on. And that mindset was piercing holes in me, turning me into a destructive cyclone that ravaged what I actually had of value. So why don't I go to bed with a gun to my head? I still feel useful and appreciated, in a raw, elemental kind of way. And the more I recognize that in myself, what I actually offer the world and my purpose, the easier it has become to turn my cyclone self into a gust of wind getting fall leaves to dance — or a very simple breath of fresh air.
Submergence
Pulled from the water of the womb, we begin to make our way back to the feeling of being submerged. How different it is from drowning! The willingness to be perfectly still and washed through. All we have is our bodies and our minds, bones anchored to the shore while we delve into the oceans of the psyche. Learning to swim float surf dive. I'm scared to ask who are drowning. I'm afraid of those who are gasping for air and pulling down everything around them, whirlpools turning life jackets into shipwreck. It frustrates me at times when the people teaching you to hold your breath have lost theirs a while ago.
Flight
I keep having dreams where I can fly. Like birds who don't have the hands to write, I don't have the wings to fly. How much time do we spend in envy of others? turning evolution into a decay of difference, as we define ourselves by what we are not. So we spend our years building metal wings to come closer to the heavens, too desperate to care how they melt in the face of the sun. The Icarus-complex that poisons us even while we're begged to pull back from the sky. But we see our greatest strengths as proof of vulnerability, broken metal in a weak chain. And so we fall down back to the earth, this time without wings or dreams.
