Or something like it...

Nearly 4:00 am and I need to get to sleep…my schedule by choice but not fitted to practicality…especially when one must work for a living…if…maybe when…I can live by my words…things will be different…I will live by my terms rather than by those of others. I hate the thought of being normal but I look around and I really, really am. I was thinking earlier about “Long Way Round” again and what I found so moving about it and what I remember now is that I was struck most by how people seem to be basically pretty good – they’ll go out of their way to help some one if they can…my cynical side says they did it because there were cameras and this was their chance to be on television or in the movies but I can’t quite believe that people out on the steppes in Asia really give a shit about the movies…I don’t know what to believe at this point and I suspect it’s up to me to take whatever meaning I find in it and leave the rest alone. Like so much, it comes right back down to faith…faith in my understanding of what I’ve seen. Going with my first impression rather than thinking it to death. If I could get this voice, this low voice, that is constantly murmuring to me beneath the surface to shut up about these things, I might be able to go on faith more often…or maybe not…maybe not ever…I just don’t know. So much seems to depend on my internal dialogue matching up with what the outside world throws at me. I wonder, what would be so bad about being wrong? Or naïve? I mean, who cares, really? I do, evidently…or at least that murmuring voice insists that I must. So, is it me? Is it that I don’t want to appear to be credulous? What would be so bad in that? I can’t even say except that it sort of smacks of…something less than intelligence. Do I think less of people for being trusting or faithful or naïve? Not really, at least I don’t think I do. It occurs to me I’ve spent these past many years, aware that what I believe I feel isn’t always what I actually feel so I’ve learned not to trust myself and that strikes me now as something of tragedy. If I can’t know myself, what can I know? And how much does it ultimately matter in any case? Life keeps moving relentlessly forward whatever is going on inside my head or not, whether I am what I believe I am doesn’t really signify. Perhaps I should take a leaf from the philosophy that holds one should behave as though something is true, without reference to the actual truth of it. Do this long enough, and it may become true, assuming it wasn’t so to begin with…so, what does that mean? What does that indicate about the truth? Only that there is no such thing, not really. There isn’t any comfort in that either – if nothing is true, is all we ever see a mask pretending to be so? And if that’s all there is, doesn’t that sort of meet the need for truth anyway? I don’t know, and I wish I did…but I’m not convinced knowing would help in any case so why mess with it at all? We’re back to behaving as though we believe something to be true and damn the rest…what’s the worst that could happen? Life will move relentlessly onward with no reference to my preference about it. So, if the point is to live and let the rest take care of itself…why resist that? And yet I do.