Wednesday, February 24, 2010

thoughts on reality, and nina simone - i wish i knew how it feels to be free




ok, so what i'm having the hardest time wrapping my head around is how separate we are.

social interaction has felt so bizarre and strange and strained and hard.

as dharma action figure formerly rocketman has said, we tell these stories to ourselves, we give ourselves stories that we play out in our heads.... even now, as i write this, there is a tape going in my head recording and rerecording and interpreting

i'm just so confused and surprised... walking by people in the street, or watching people on campus, everyone going somewhere with these stories in their heads. if you zoom out from street level, out to space and watch the planet spin and spin - we are like these objects moving through space with some recording playing before our eyes, interacting and creating this giant web of connections and movement and stories and shapes and understandings throughout time - as time spins forward this great understanding morphs and changes and grows - and then you can pause and zoom that back down to us.

we are these blips. we are so short. yet we get consumed by ourselves.

our worlds are ourselves. and it's weird because we do shape that by being alive, by being able to shape this "idea" that carries forward through time to another person's mind. i only have a picture in my mind of living in ancient greece or maya because somebody did live that (and then archaeology and technology come into play).

we play out these lives, and we will never fully understand what it's like to live another person's life. i just want to splash into peoples' heads and inhabit their bodies and understand what it is to be them, what it is to think in their heads. i want to escape my own being - it feels heavy, it feels like a burden, it feels empty. and to even say that where am i speaking from?

so where do we connect? where do we see each other? where do we meet?
and how? on what?

5 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Hey Samra,
    This is Betselot. I went to high school with you at ICS. You should check out "To be Young, Gifted and Black" by Nina.

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  3. Betselot! how are you?! wowowow, long time! thank you, i will definitely check it out... and re stanford - yeahhh, i've heard that from others there as well... bizarre culture at these places, eh? being back at harvard is really hard.

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  4. feel like taking time off myself..but dont want to kill my "uberethiopian" father:)
    turning Harvard upside down?

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  5. As Mark Twain said and as Jack Kornfield always quotes "My life has been filled with terrible misfortune, most of which never happened."

    I am living your life and you are living mine. We meet in dreams, we meet in smiles,hugs and kisses, we meet in sadness and grief.

    you can pick all of the flowers but you can't stop the spring- Neruda

    dharma-action-figure

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