Immeasurability

I am often told my self-awareness will do me good in the long run. Opportunities to learn and grow, introspection serving as a catalyst for higher achievement and overall success. My question, though, is whether or not the acute level of critical thinking I experience is a barrier to beliefs that drive the good choices that will get me there.

Informed choices lead to intentional habits, and intentional habits pay off long term when one realizes they have become their habits. The automatic responding mechanisms, the impulses, instincts, and ways that become ingrained in your muscle memory... They stick and become your personal default. They are iron beams, the foundation with which one can further manifest ideas, express opinions, and cultivate leadership. Everyone will realize at a certain point that they have become their thought patterns, impulses, ticks, and coping methods. They have latched in those attitudes towards challenges; they have diverged into either becoming the seeker of opportunity or the acceptor of a lack thereof. 

My reality can be like zooming in on a ruler to find new tick-marks sprouting within the old. My brain, like any brain, works like a computer. It is an analytical brain, persistent in it’s search for pattern. Scanning, calculating, evaluating. Weighing, proportioning, scaling. Every conscious thought is merely a flash, a glimpse, a fleeting indication that there is 95% of an unconscious brain beneath the thoughts. The brain receives a massive influx of information in a given minute, and so the brain must learn the way a computer does. The more information you feed it, the more it learns pattern. The more it learns repetition, value, significance. It must, and it does, in efforts to make sense of a planet unthinkably new and strange. 

We exist on a planet, in a universe with cosmos more complex than comprehensible and seas deeper than explorable and yet we are obsessed with the reality in front of us. We are obsessed with it because it is truly all that we have. The timeline slows for no one, speeds for no one. We fly unbridled along the timeline like the incandescent blur in a highway tunnel at night. Electricity crackling, energy reverberating. Sometimes, we are alive. Experiencing whatever new emotion, conversation, or sensation the day presents. The day itself is a pioneer of its kind. The day is uncertain with the information of clashing realities too much to sustain in a single moment. What do we do to cope? We find comfort in patterns and structure, comfort in the numbers of it all.

We cannot understand the complexity of the earth because the human brain is fallible and blindsided. We process numbers every second of our lives without understanding that they’re numbers. We feel speed and force. We feel angles and momentum. 

It is true; math surrounds us. But no infant knows of math. Infants know of touch and pressure, weight and temperature. They do not know of figures and statistics, proportions and postulates, but they know of an atmosphere colorful and tangible, damp or parched, warm or brisk. The way you do not go to the beach to calculate the local gravity but for the twinge of salt on your lips and the forceful sway of the waves when neck deep within them. The lullaby of the earth hums to you and cradles you. The water is slimy and mercilessly sharp, the chill quickens your heartbeat. You feel alive, and you feel stimulated. You are new, and you are rejuvenated. Numbers will tickle but only the earth can touch you this way. Only experience can touch you this way. 

It is drastically different to know good choices, to think good thoughts, and to attempt mental resilience. It is another to practice it. It is one thing to breathe a mantra, chant it religiously. It is one thing to churn the words, to leach the words like spaghetti dough through a pasta machine. It is another to internalize them and to believe them. 

I am often told my self-awareness will do me good in the long run. Opportunities to learn and grow, introspection serving as a catalyst for higher achievement and overall success. I cannot help but wonder if the numbing reality inside my mind is a place worth being, if it is a place safer than the wild and immeasurable realities outside of it. I cannot help but ache for a reality less perfectly exact.