The Water Can Clear
On the turbulence between who we are and who we're becoming.
Sometimes I wonder whether our inner water can ever truly be clear. Those murky lakes, boiling puddles, surfaces whipped by wind that block our sight — this is often my default state. How am I supposed to perceive the infinite distances between myself and the people closest to me, let alone love them? There’s something grand about the idea of embracing that expanse, of seeing the other as a whole against an immeasurable sky. But my own sky is often overcast.
Maybe it’s the waves coming from outside. Financial worries, new relationships, the feeling of one’s own attractiveness — all of it fluctuates. These aren’t internal decisions clouding my water. They’re external forces defining my satisfaction, shaping my self-image. How can I begin a conscious transformation when the material of my thinking is constantly being re-colored from somewhere else? The promise of rising, the symbol of the airplane hovering above everything, starts to feel like a distant illusion. I can imagine lifting myself above something — but the turbulence is baked into the system.
It might also be that there is no “I” at all that truly perceives or rises. If consciousness is only a function, a process that converts inputs into outputs, then maybe I’m just a kind of information processing. The material irrelevant, the process everything. What does it mean, then, to feel a contradiction within myself? Is it just a bug in the algorithm, a glitch in the data processing? My sense of confusion would then be nothing more than an output. But who or what feels that? And whose soul is it that longs for clarity, if the self is only a series of functions?
This distance, this function — they remain irreconcilable.