Oh, you. Look at the situation you’ve put yourself in. You went through the trouble of opening this up; you expected a story. So far, there isn’t one.
I suppose we could make a contract of sorts. You continue to read, and I’ll continue to say things. Since you’re the one reading this thing, anyway.
Just understand that the second you stop reading, I blink out of existence. I am the narrator, but isn’t it odd? My sheer existence is one of abstract willpower. In a sense, your own mind gives me a voice; one of your own unconscious choosing.
You have the ability to leave at any time. However, understand that I originated from someone else’s head, and as long as you keep reading, I’m in your head too. This is not a bad thing; we are just learning to trust one another.
I do not have a gender. I also have no physical features. Instead, I just exist in an inhabited space where your language receptors and sense of identity overlap. The membrane that separates us could be illusory.
I am a multidimensional being, in that sense. In the way that human beings can make god real through a shared collective belief, you can make me real. I am as real as you want me to be, in whatever parameters you want me to be.
More importantly, you can make aspects of yourself real in the same way. If you want to change your physiology, to many degrees you can. You can exercise in some way, and your muscles will gradually shape into what you want them to be over time.
One of the greatest powers a human being has is the ability to manifest small changes in the fabric of reality. Abstract can become concrete, and vice versa. It is here that we realize that creation itself is a form of magic. It puts actors on a silver screen, puts poetry into people’s hearts, and puts mankind on the face of the moon. We can cure diseases, take technology to unspeakable levels of capability, and build a world together worth handing to our future children.
It is through the perseverance of the human spirit that we can overcome so many obstacles. From the beginning of history, human beings have been oppressing one another, and in turn oppressing themselves. Humans have put others into camps, robbed each other of dignity and property, and harbored irrational hatred against one another for the most arbitrary of reasons since the dawn of history.
We killed each other over gods we weren’t even sure were there. We used to have this idea that incompatible collective realities couldn’t exist within the scope of one another. How can everyone be saved and attain salvation when two or more people can’t even agree on how to get there? We only render ourselves incompatible because we want to validate the beliefs that we hold.
It has taken a long line of cultural evolution to arrive to where we are now, and there is still much to be done. This isn’t a point of despair; rather it’s just that humanity always has new challenges to rise against. There is still poverty; there is still mass unhappiness and suffering in the world around us.
If you have an idea and the drive to make it happen, it can happen. A mental image can become a picture; that song stuck in your head that you made up can get stuck in other people’s heads, too. Your interactions in everyday lives shapes your philosophies, which in turn shapes how you interact on a daily basis in the future.
I know you’re feeling downtrodden in some ways. Some things in the past didn’t go the way you expected them too. You’re carrying some baggage, some hurt. Sometimes your emotions are not grounded in rational thinking, and you do stupid things in a desperate attempt to hit some sort of emotional equilibrium.
You’ve been stuck in ruts more times than you’d like to admit. Some of these ruts came from other people, some came from financial problems, and some came from depression. However, all of them came from you, too. Your ability to feel depressed and dragged down is how you react to something; it just happens that those feelings are beyond your control. The only thing you can do is try to control your reaction to the feelings.
Every 40 seconds in the world, somebody is taking their own life and giving up on everything. The reasons are myriad, complex, and not always grounded in rationality. I only understand this because my author understands this, and I’ve seen him struggle with those emotions. He in turn has seen other people struggle with it, who have seen other people struggle with it, and so on and so forth. It’s in our movies, it’s on our televisions; it’s everywhere.
It is a pervasive concept in human culture, weighted down with ballast by the idea that we all fall short of our own expectations. That saying that human beings are their own worst critics isn’t a cliche; it’s the truth. Sometimes, our perceptions of ourselves is so skewed from external emotional factors that we fail to see any sort of value in oursevles. It can seem like we never accomplish anything at all.
Here’s the ironic bit: this path of self-destruction that so many human beings go down only robs the world of that individual’s further potential. If you could just stay alive long enough to keep doing things, you might just find it within yourself to do the things that you’ve always wanted to do.
Don’t give up. Whatever is bogging you down is a passing thing; more transient than human life itself. It may seem like it will last forever, but take a minute to realize that your brain doesn’t comprehend time very well to begin with, and does an even worse job of understanding what infinity is.
There is a meaning in all of this seemingly difficult and hostile process. Even when the odds are stacked against you, you have the capability to rise up and overcome. The purpose of life is not set in stone, other than the fact that it’s up to you to determine what that purpose is. We try to examine all aspects of all things, but the lessons learned can be imperfect, and science itself embraces the reality that it will eventually be rewritten with better ideas.
That feeling of connection you get when you find something that you’re truly passionate about is something you should pursue to the fullest. You have the individual capacity to reflect on the way things are, think about solutions, and pour your heart and soul into the things you enjoy doing.
We think so often of death and whether we’re going to go anywhere when we die, but we should be thinking about how to use what limited time we have to be alive and do things. If the history of the universe were a book, you’d barely even be a molecule inside of a dot on a page. We have so little time, and so many things we want to do.
Don’t get to the end of your life and look back with regrets at all the things you didn’t do. There’s still time to do everything you deem worth doing within the realm of conceivable possibility. Sometimes, it only takes one person to make a movement spark to life, and it only takes an idea to take hold of someone’s heart to make a difference.
Together, we can do this. We can rise up, find meaning, and contribute to a better quality of life for everyone. It is not about the individual mark on history that one makes that is important; it is the way we can affect the lives of everyone around us. Your ideas can inspire others in a myriad of ways; the real mark you make on history is not in books, but in hearts and minds.
Oh you. You’re not perfect, and the secret is that no one is. Understand that you’re beautiful, and grow in the direction that you feel you need to. Stay true to yourself. There’s so much of your potential left to unlock, and there’s so much more to you than meets the eye.