Monday, 30 July 2012

21:20 hs



Can one really live completely without superstition? I mean, even leaving aside belief in a supernatural dimension, couldn't it be the case that a proper grasp of certain life events isn't really within reach of one's rational capacity? And that guessing with the help of sheer intuition sometimes becomes the only reasonable course to take?Well, perhaps I should just drop this slightly fatuous attempt at a prelude to what's been really on my mind all day. If my tepid determination to keep a diary is to be made good on, it is alright for me not to focus solely on a list of the day's events. As yesterday's entry made clear to myself, I don't seem to qualify even for the mundane task of getting the chronology right before I sit down to write. But I shouldn't hedge my bets with preliminary thoughts of a general kind, as though I were talking about something that matters outside the context of my private life.

I haven't been able to resist entertaining the notion that certain choices we make in life are endowed with what I'd call a current. Like sea currents. Currents that take you inexorably in a well-defined direction. There may be plenty of room for small variations, but which are engulfed by the broad lines of an immovable trend.

Defeatism is something which, for the untrained eye, I could be accused of with justice. Talk of inexorable directions smacks, no doubt, of passivity and impotence in the face of life's events. And I think that is where the word superstition seems to suggest itself effortlessly. Superstition, that is, in the special sense of being a last resource, when there is just too much going on, at too fast a pace, for you to hope to be able to make sense of things.

You make a guess. It can only be called a guess. It can't possibly be a theory, not even in the non-scientific sense of the word. When I use the word theory I like to be able to present at least a few interesting reasons that back it up. Anyway, immediately after warning myself against talking as if I had some deep universal insight into the nature of life to offer to humanity, I fell back straight into the same mistake. I'm glad I'm talking to myself.

But, yes, I think I'm kind of stuck. I think this is just going to go on like this indefinitely. If I just carry on, my life will simply continue to be exactly what it has been since I decided to change its tack radically a decade and a half ago. Which, of course, seems to offer one single way out: I need to go back to what made me take the road that led me to where I am. Yes, perhaps this whole effort - this effort that has certainly brought with it many gains - has simply amounted to a postponement. I may have simply taken a break of life. A break that has been going on for an absurdly long time. I have been acting like someone who wants to avoid doing some necessary task by playing videogames or washing the car.

And yet, there were so many little distractions along the way, that some of them became important. They demand my attention and they want to follow their course to the end, until, like a river, they reach some sea that gives me back my freedom. But maybe I'm juts kidding myself, as has become my habit.

When is enough enough?

I can't tell. Perhaps I'm completely wrong about this theory of mine that equates superstition with rationality, albeit in a suitably loose manner.

Well, I guess I'm bound to go on and on in circles tonight. If I stop here, I will at least have suggested to myself some interesting lines of thought, which I'd be better advised to take up once I'm feeling a bit happier and less obsessed with my search for a clear answer to a messy network of enmeshed questions. This entanglement of emotions blindly trying to make sense of a recent past that is by no means characterized by uniformity. I shouldn't be in a hurry to identify patterns in this complex landscape of fifteen years. It's better to allow some clouds to dissolve and some fresh air to be blown by the summery breeze of a rainy end of July, and make decisions with a mind that feels generous, rather than cornered by these ghostly, spectral hounds of time.