Apr 6

 Wandering.

Watched a video today of a doggo enjoying themselves. Waiting for buckets of water to tip over them. Just. Obsessed with the joy of it. Living in the moment. This is apex dog. It's also the thing we suck at as humans. Simple pure joy.

I can remember times my two mutts also had things like that. The first day we discovered and improved a stick on a rope attached to a tree. Ares was absolutely blown away with it. Tugging on it. Swinging on it. Chasing it when he let it go. We must have sat there for 30 minutes watching him. Athena would join in. Get barged out. It was Ares absolute singular point of joy. For weeks after we would go past there and he would go play with the stick. He loved tugging on things. They both did. Half felled dying trees were the best. They would team up. And tug them over. Sometimes dangling off them. Pure joy.

I would always take them places I knew they liked, or thought they might come to like. Exploring places. Finding new places. Always doing my best to have the world be interesting and alive to them. It was a very conscious plan I had. An environmental enrichment thing. Imagine yourself a dog. What appeals to you ? Now as a human. What can you do to make that happen. It is in the end not difficult. It just takes a little time and patience and commitment. Kindness. And allowing them to be them. Not some appendage of yourself.

I don't know what any of this means.

I cannot find a place for it.

It exists. It is a thing. It makes sense.

But in the greater circle.

It makes no sense.

Intellectually. As ever. I get it.

This is some of the things I live with. There is that tension between the micro and the macro. The local and the global. And. Very dog centric. The difference between enjoying the moment. And getting lost in the sauce of the infinitely large soup pot.

But it's more than that.

I can see the cruelty that is intrinsic to existence. Life. Being an aware observer in the universe.

You can watch beauty and marvel be created, grow, blossom, be all it can be and then... watch it wither and die.

There is no comfort in some notion of it being a "cycle". Of some constantly turning over engine of creation.

Within the destruction there is a lessening. A destroying of beautiful things. A nulling out.

And even the argument. Well. It happened. And whilst it happened it was good. Sure. But. The aftermath. It disappears into dreams. It becomes no different to a fantasy. A nice thought you had about something fantastical. It starts to unravel what existence is, what reality is, what any of it means. What. Is the point.

So.

I don't know what any of it means.

It makes sense at the local.

And that, is where we are designed to fit. Designed by evolution. We are a local space entity. That has accidentally gained the trick of resolving global space viewpoints.

To gaze into the infinite is to stare into the face of God and be destroyed.

Nietszches Abyss.

There is much wisdom encoded through human history about this. Subtly. If you can read it.

Stick to the paths. Be present. Practice mindfulness. Stay in the moment.

And more behaviourally dictated than that. Structured theology. Notions of reward. Of right. Of it all making sense given a ( mythical ) structure. The walls built along the abyss to stop you from even realising it's there. Just a wall. Comforting. Stable. Strong.

We are not meant to wander the paths of the Abyss.

I have wandered them for a long time. 

There are some doors once you walk through them, you cannot pass back through them. 

This is just one string of the harmony that is my despair. A small string. But it adds its frequency to the chord.