Saturday, November 26, 2005
the return of blog 

i haven't written very many contemplative posts in the past few months, which probably has no impact on my mental health. but i find that it's nice to look back on what i used to think, just to gain perspective, if nothing else. and so since i found myself writing a contemplative entry in xanga (which i generally try not to do), i figured it's time to start blogging again.

so my korean class watched the most ridiculously sappy but depressing movie the other day (our section teacher started crying about one hour in and didn't stop crying 50 min later after the movie was over... lol). anyway, long story short is, after watching a really cliched movie, i couldn't help but think that the cliche of "live every day like it's your last" is so true. i always used to disregard this statement, because i would think, if i were to really live like it's my last day, i'd try to do all the amazing things that i want try and dispense of those tedious, mundane tasks like work... which realistically is impossible. in some ways though, i don't think the things that make life great necessarily are those grandiose things--travelling around the world is great and all, but it's really the little things about life that i would miss the most if i were dead, i think. not that i'm not grateful for the grandiose as well-- it really puts things into perspective, which is always helpful. but sunrises, learning something new and mastering a piece of knowledge even though it takes sleepless nights, the biting cold as i hurry around harvard square and watch the old panhandler who's perennially camped out on the corner with his ridiculously cute dog and cat huddled together underneath a blanket, just hanging out with somebody and talking about nothing and everything... anything that seems mundane and that i might complain about... to me, living each day to the fullest is just being aware and savoring every moment that i and the world around me is breathing and heaving with life, regardless of whether that moment is "pleasant" or not.

while i was trying to write an essay for the burchard scholars program, i looked through some old essays from high school on borges. and although i don't know if i necessarily agree with borges's interpretation of time, i still find them quite interesting, and will leave off with a few excerpts from "the garden of forking paths" that i find especially appropriate as i continue to mull my life, past/present/future, over.


"Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do."



"It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite-a labyrinth not of octagonal Pavillions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms.... I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite."

"Then I reflected that all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me..."


--posted by M @ 12:31 AM | 0 comments

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