Curiosity Is What Keeps the World Spinning
On Saturday and Sunday, I reflect a lot on things that happened during the past week. Practically, this works, but theoretically, it makes zero sense.
Days are imaginary. Every day just follows a new day and a new day. So, the fact that I spend a lot of time looking backward in time on the weekend only exists in my perspective.
But it still works. We have boxed reality in a way that's understandable. Saturday and Sunday (depending on your culture, of course) are things that happen at the end of the week, and Monday is like a new start. Again, completely made up. But it works.
The same goes for taking moments of silence during a day. Completely made up. But they work. They break the rhythm you are stuck in.
This Analogy Is Also How a Universe Starts
As long as a universe is everything, it has no forwards or backwards. It has no arrow of time.
So you start with time → you create and create, and on the seventh day, you sit and rest. Now, you have created a direction, a forward motion.
If I Say to You We Have This and That Tree, There Is Only One Tree You Can't Eat From
What do you do?
I would only care about that tree I can't eat from. Now, the rest of the trees would look relatively uninteresting.
Curiosity in this universe is never being punished.
Relationships based on fear
I once heard a guy say, “The things you do right now will make a huge impact over a longer time.”
I mean, the guy is a hundred percent right.
The problem is that you built a relationship with the future based on fear.
Because, reversely, it means this:
“If I don’t do my homework, I’ll end up as a bum on the street.”
“If I don’t work out, I’ll get fat.”
It’s not that this isn’t true in a way, but you push a lot of interesting things away because you are so scared that something might happen in the future. You don’t build a relationship with working out based on fun. Instead, you have built it because you are afraid that something might happen in the future if you don’t work out.
It’s like Buddhists do: “If I don’t meditate, I leave the here and now.” You have now built a relationship with your thoughts based on paranoia and distrust. Because the implication is that daydreaming means drifting away from the here and now, which is a very, very huge flaw in your thinking.
Thinking and reflecting about things that happened in the past are not things that don’t happen in the here and now. Thinking about the past is something that happens here, now.
The Snake
I was having dinner with my family on Friday night.
On Saturday, I had lunch with a smaller part of our family.
Suddenly, the tone of the conversation struck me. It was about AI taking over the world, riots in France, our neighbourhood going downhill, weird people lately.
The moment I realized that, I was like, ‘Wow, this is bad.’
But at the same time, I realized, ‘No, this is actually something good.’
I am separating myself from the conversation. If I were exactly as negative as the tone of the conversation, I wouldn't notice the tone of the conversation. But since I can separate myself from it, this is actually a good sign. It means I am something different, something more positive.
In biblical terms, this is the snake. It's the moment you notice something, like becoming aware of your own nakedness, which appears to be bad but is actually a good sign. Because otherwise, you wouldn't notice the difference. If everything were one hundred percent shame, nobody would know.
Funny enough, the reverse is also true. The fact that family members talk about things they find negative also has to mean that there is a lot of good in them – otherwise, they wouldn't know the difference either.