It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t hold any shape. Life, I mean. It’s not crystalline, not bound to rigid geometric rules. It’s not fluid either because fluids obey laws. Strange laws, I’ll grant you that, but laws nonetheless. But life seems a different beast entirely. We have a thousand ways of describing it. We call it a path, but where does it lead? We call it a gamble, but what are the stakes if not the game itself? We call it a liar and a cheat, but what did we have before it, what has it taken from us?
One thing I’m sure of. Life isn’t logical. Nothing as easy as that. We like to think it is, well, I like to think it is. I’m an engineer. If A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C. That’s a rule. That’s math. And that kind of thinking doesn’t work in real life. Not in anything that matters, anyway. Sometimes when A equals B, and B equals C, then A not only doesn’t equal C but A is opposed to C on a moral level. Engineer that, I dare you.
As a side note, did you know that there is no logical proof that logic even works? You can’t use logic to prove its own existence. It begs the question. When Descartes did his little mind game and came up with the now famous and often misunderstood sound bite, “I think therefore I am,” he assumed the world was logical. In other words, his supposedly assumption-less argument was based on the presupposition that logical constructs ruled the world. It’s like saying that if aliens wear yellow g-strings, the sun will come up tomorrow, and then running around town the next day telling people aliens wear yellow g-strings just because, lo and behold, the sun came up. Well, it’s not exactly like that. But aliens in yellow g-strings are funny, and I needed a laugh.
I used to think I knew the meaning of life, and I’ll probably wake up tomorrow thinking I have it all figured out. But today, right now, I don’t have a friggin’ clue. All the logical constructs I use to hold the world in its place are shifting on their foundations, and I’m not terribly certain I care for that.
So what have we learned today? We’ve learned that I shouldn’t write when I’m tired and burnt out and in that weird mood I get sometimes where nothing makes sense but my mind still feels sharp, the one where I feel as solid as a rock but the world feels like it’s shifting on its axis, throwing everything out of whack. I can only hope the world will have righted itself by morning so I can go back to making sense.
One thing I’m sure of. Life isn’t logical. Nothing as easy as that. We like to think it is, well, I like to think it is. I’m an engineer. If A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C. That’s a rule. That’s math. And that kind of thinking doesn’t work in real life. Not in anything that matters, anyway. Sometimes when A equals B, and B equals C, then A not only doesn’t equal C but A is opposed to C on a moral level. Engineer that, I dare you.
As a side note, did you know that there is no logical proof that logic even works? You can’t use logic to prove its own existence. It begs the question. When Descartes did his little mind game and came up with the now famous and often misunderstood sound bite, “I think therefore I am,” he assumed the world was logical. In other words, his supposedly assumption-less argument was based on the presupposition that logical constructs ruled the world. It’s like saying that if aliens wear yellow g-strings, the sun will come up tomorrow, and then running around town the next day telling people aliens wear yellow g-strings just because, lo and behold, the sun came up. Well, it’s not exactly like that. But aliens in yellow g-strings are funny, and I needed a laugh.
I used to think I knew the meaning of life, and I’ll probably wake up tomorrow thinking I have it all figured out. But today, right now, I don’t have a friggin’ clue. All the logical constructs I use to hold the world in its place are shifting on their foundations, and I’m not terribly certain I care for that.
So what have we learned today? We’ve learned that I shouldn’t write when I’m tired and burnt out and in that weird mood I get sometimes where nothing makes sense but my mind still feels sharp, the one where I feel as solid as a rock but the world feels like it’s shifting on its axis, throwing everything out of whack. I can only hope the world will have righted itself by morning so I can go back to making sense.
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