As much as I love peak experiences, there is also the delicate joy that consists in the quiet delight of things rather ordinary. A crisp morning with no noise of industry, birds chirping, squirrels foraging, all along a splendid, illustrious, and tolerable sunshine. I am not one for being overly sentimental, too much sap spoils the pleasure. Also, I don’t like sharing my inmost feelings with all and sundry. All the same, sometimes I just want to watch the weather and to feel deeply so as to understand the aesthetic significance of how wonderfully imbued the colors are after a summer rain.
Perhaps I betray an inability to comprehend the complexities of life, but a simple and uncomplicated life sounds preferable. I suspect we are constantly inundated with a barrage of incessant novelty. Newest iteration of the iPhone be damned. By preoccupying ourselves with the inessential, we have made an art of sophisticated ways of killing time.
There are times when the weather is just right – a clarity prevails, and the contesting forces of nature seem to have achieved a momentary abatement. Everything is at last ameliorated, and the motion of things has some kind of affable equilibrium. At last things are free to be themselves unimpeded, before some alien thing insinuated itself and scammed everything into believing they needed to be something else or somewhere else, as if they lacked something. Like the stereotypical and annoying high-pressure salesman who cons people into thinking they need something they don’t, which is of course what they have to sell.
Maybe you’ve been scammed. Maybe you were sold something you didn’t need, or worse; maybe you bought on credit something that was taken from you. Maybe you were tricked into believing a lie. You bought into it, and so now it is true. Maybe you gave what you needed for a cheap, disposable, disappointing trinket, only to realize after it was too late. Oh, but you can have it back…at a price you can’t afford. Time is money, and you don’t have money. Sign on the dotted line. Whoops! Now your time is no longer yours. You traded your time for your inheritance, but you won’t have the time to enjoy it. You just end up losing more and more of what little you have left.
Lies depend on honesty. Consider how society would work if everyone always lied. It wouldn’t work at all. No one would believe anyone. That is why, in the story of the Garden of Eden, the forbidden fruit was of Good and Evil, because the only power evil has is in its distortion of the truth. William Blake was right, the truth told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
This foreign thing, this conman, it sold you something it didn’t even rightfully possess. It took advantage of the good in you, to profit itself at your expense. A parasite, an alien principle, whose very form is outsourced to others and whose essence is lack and lie, who can only embody itself by stealing, killing, controlling, and destroying. It has converted you into itself, and now you yourself are outsourced to it… misery loves company.
Imagicination 