People are interesting, but they’d be more interesting if they weren’t so damned irritating. Irritation… what is it about irritation? Where does it come from? It’s not actually from other people. It’s a reaction to them. Your mind, the great inference machine, generating all these associations, encouraging primordial emotions to well up from deep within your unconscious. Feelings of fight or flight, or if more pleasant, to draw you in, bring you closer. But irritation, that’s not pleasant. It's a grain of sand in a clam’s mouth. Though the clam can’t really escape it. So, it smooths it over. Makes a pearl. Can we do that? And what if there’s a choice? What if we can escape it, but maybe we shouldn’t. What if the irritation is part and parcel of something that’s attractive as well as irritating?
We can purify, filter, concentrate. We can remove impurities. Yet, like a perfect circle, like an absolute vacuum, these are things that we can approach, but cannot fully attain. Asymptotes are, by definition, not obtainable. So how much purity do we need? When do we say we have enough of it? And then there is the notion of doping, of adding impurity to a thing to get it to function in a certain way. Silicon chips, the movement of electrons in them, is dependent upon impurity.
If irritation is a form of impurity, of the introduction of something
that our mind wants out, wants to be rid of, that doesn’t mean we should be rid
of it. Getting what we want isn’t necessarily
what’s good for us. Not that wanting
isn’t needed, isn’t necessary. But the
specifics of wanting may be off target, and not particularly good for us. Fantasy, dreams. The wants of adolescence, the wants when
under duress, these are not wants that are actually to be fulfilled. Although they reveal a direction, they point
the way in some non-Euclidean space-time place in our minds to which our will
is to be directed. They fulfill some ancestral
logic of evolutionary significance, pulling us along, pushing us forward in
time toward something we are meant to do, a place we are to find, and in so
doing, to find ourselves.
Our own personal development recapitulates, at least
metaphorically, the development of life as we know it. One cell to many. Differentiation, tissue formation,
coordination, combination, the building of an organism, an ecology that is nested
in other, larger ecologies. Like moons
and planets and suns and galaxies, the parts of us patterned from forces that
attract and repel. Along the way, LaGrange
points of equilibrium, of balance and stability. Points of energy neutrality. Homeostasis.
And us, each being, part of the larger ecology of humanity, which is
itself part of the multi-species ecology of life on the earth. Our very DNA an admixture of the instructions
from multiple life forms that have been combined and selected for their
previously successful adaptive capabilities; now surrendered to the present, to
the now of existence that will test their mettle, in a dance of life that
brings everything together in moments of sublime ecstasy and excruciating
pain. A dance which pantomimes all that
we have been with a promise for what we may yet become. All the while moving in a present that takes
the dance this way and that, standing and falling, circling, and crawling. Arms outstretched and curled into a fetal
position. A dance that each of us has
some say in. In which, at each moment we
can choose to embrace life or reject it, to take our irritations and turn them
into pearls or to fall pray to their destructive energy, let them dissemble us,
conceal our true selves, and thus diminish the positive power of our
being.
