If you go for a stroll, what is it that you bring back with you? When you go for a stroll, do you take with you the things on your mind or are you taking in the things that surround? In the course of a lifetime perhaps it is difficult to look back and see the purpose of things, and sometimes even the result of things as simple as these little interludes.
When I was a senior in high school, I used to park my car about 10 minutes away, and the result was everyday I had a pleasant walk to and from the last place I wanted to be. My friends were and are fantastic people, and they were really the only motivation I had to not skip class and do more interesting things with my life, like maybe begin the walk to school and not stop there, but just keep going..
Anyways, along the way I used to think about life as a game. I would see the breeze blow lightly through the trees causing each leaf to gently flicker in the radiant sun. I thought about the games I played at the time, starcraft, infantry.. such simple games from the frontend but obviously with such magnificent amounts of programming and memory requirements forming the backend. I thought about a non-existent game called 'life', where we can just explore and do the things we would in real life, dreamed about some simple physics engine that would just make it all be the same, except it would be a place where I didn't have to do what I'm told.
But something would be missing wouldn't it? In fact its not something that would be missing, its EVERYTHING. The randomness, the chaos, the chance encounters, the space within the spaces, the infinite depth of what we can't even perceive. There are simply too many things that go on behind the tiny scope of our perception, however broad we intend.
On Mondays I go somewhere at 5:45, and because of daylight savings and the ordered chaotic turns of our universe, its been getting darker and darker at that time. There was one intersection in particular, at the corner of a What-a-burger, and some other restaurants, where you would be greeted by the incessant chatter of the grackles. They were everywhere, all carrying out interesting conversations with eachother, well fed on the detritus of the same human society they remain aloof to. Just as they do to us, we do to them, and we simply carry on with our own lives after at most a short moment of thought. I have, as I'm sure you have as well, seen these massive gatherings with ubiquity over the many years. But two days ago, this Monday, I was disappointed to hear nothing and see none of them. I figured they don't use watches or cell phone clocks so they must simply wake and sleep with the rising and setting of the sun. But where do they sleep? Evidently not here. I thought perhaps they gather in some buildings somewhere, huddled together like the worlds biggest football team poised for a heroic comeback in the last minute of the game. Maybe. Enough anyways for my mind to wander somewhere else as I continued my drive.
Last night I went to HEB after a massive meal at 888. Needed some soymilk. On the way out I walked towards the car, thinking about how cold a night it was. My eyes were lowered to the ground, as they oftentimes are, trying to spot something of interest, as I usually do. I jumped over a triangular curbed section with a tree, and back on the pavement and noticed bunches of dried bird shit. Probably from earlier. But with some impulse I swung around and looked up and saw them. All of them! Tiny but huge, huddled motionless figures that filled the branches. In that small tree there were easily 50 of these beautiful creatures, fast asleep. Occasionally one would stretch its 'shoulders' and preen itself a bit before resuming its sleep-stance. And every tree all around, upon closer inspection, was replete with them!
My mind flashed to all the things I had ever seen or thought of that reminded me of this. A clay-breasted robin at eye level asleep in a tree in the Costa Rican jungle in one of my late night treks. Carpenter ant soldiers poised motionless with mandibles open in front of the entrances to the nest at the corner of a building before sunrise at Big Bend. Social fish in aquariums hovering, imprisoned and doing nothing in their little boxes. Prisoners locked away in the last corners of the world allotted to them by society. The young stashed away in little windowless classrooms. Bacteria and planets and the spins of a macromolecule and the spins of the galaxy. We the privileged tucked away in our little boxes every night.. And the homeless huddled together but apart from one another on a street in a cold night in Canada.. and austin.. and houston.. and and..
The invisibles. Insects, animals, humans, all around.. worlds within worlds. Stories within stories.. the infinite universe all around yet nowhere in our mind. No game could ever create this, there can be no 'Matrix' that isn't completely without the essence of what composes this reality. But I am reminded of "the Giver".. if we are all conditioned to live one way, to look only in certain places for certain things, how will we ever know what we've been missing?
As I think i said a couple days ago, the world you perceive is a kind of reflection of what is within. The more you try to see, the more you become, and then the more you see once again. What gives us this illusion that we are in control of everything? That we are the pinnacle of evolution? What is this persisting view that we are the center of the universe? For all our thrashing, flailing, and trumpeting, we ourselves are The Invisibles. Or maybe the real truth is that none of us, none of the things we see or don't see are The Invisibles at all. Maybe we're all expressions of the same thing, no less than and no more than eachother.. Just maybe..
From one angle, theres a stark beauty in all this, like the sharp walls of a Rothko exhibit. And from another angle there is an emerging order to all the chaos, like an exquisite fractal. But no matter which way you cut it, its all beauty. Beauty abounds and it is fueled by our noticing, our interest, our mind and our love. We don't have to pull apart the tapestry to enjoy its intricacy. Every level is there to behold, if only you would.
And still there will always be more than meets the mind.