It is quite likely that nearly everyone has had the experience of having heard that it is a bad thing. However, is it possible to be entirely sure that such is the case?
I wish I could confidently state whether last night was a moment of unbidden clarity or just an insomnia riddled mind wandering through its own cobweb infested corridors. It is the sort of thing that usually manifests itself when thoughts go freewheeling without pattern or definition. When the body prays for rest and the mind retorts, "Rest? What the devil do you mean rest? I am like the heart. I rest, you die."
So walking through that semi-opaque fog, a space opened up briefly, allowing the vision to gallop far and wide instead of the halting uncertainty that hinders progress through all manner of fogs.
It is easy to call something an obsession. Indeed, it is not merely easy, more often than not it is the most convenient label to tack on to some things in other people.
But what if you stop a moment and actually consider the matter. Somewhere deep inside there sits this mechanism that we call instinct. A wholesome yet not always reliable entity that seems to be completely independent from logic and causality. It does not reason, it leaps. The mind may think a myriad things in a flash and still continue routine tasks, but instinct has a speed that could make light envious if a competition ever arose between the two.
That, however, is an insufficient explanation. Instinct does not work over decades (not mine anyway). There is something deeper. An understanding which, like instinct, is free from so-called reality because reality is only that which is now. This thing, whatever it might be, is so primal and seems (repeat, seems) to have gone overlooked for so long that no one ever bothered bestowing a moniker on it.
It resembles instinct so closely that apart from the anomaly of the temporal distance over which the two work they might be one. The closest analog that comes to mind is a microscope and telescope, one sees near and the other far, and no one can see too near or too far without their aid.
So this thing creates a strong push towards something, a push that can outlive the corrosive power of time itself. One might struggle with it now and then (eventually everything involves some sort of struggle, I guess), but though it may quiet down, it never truly goes away. Time passes, the push reasserts itself. Again and again until it turns into a kind of dull ache that you simply learn to live with.
The pattern seems so meaningless and yet sometimes a glimpse will flit by suggesting it is perhaps not so bereft of said quality after all.
This invisible push appears to have been steering a course in the background of life that might have led to different vistas if certain things had fallen into different slots (which, of course, they did not and now they cannot). A strange push that pushes back all the harder if you try to push back. A push that starts sending out warning signals as if some sort of instinct inhabiting it had indicated that allotted time was going by too fast. "Get it done quick", it warns in haste, "you idled away for so long without heeding me and now there is precious little time left. But whatever is left, do be quick."
The more this pattern is observed, the more clarity descends on the truth that it is quite likely we know more than we think we know. Not something nascent but rather something ancient with the amassed wisdom of all the time it has been around. Something that knows where we tend to doubt. Something that does while we hesitate. Something that is always where we merely pass through.
So the question that arises is whether it is an obsession if someone is unknowingly following this push, not even knowing there is a push, only this insatiable mad drive for an unknown something (well, there might be concrete objects too).
I feel that we need to rethink the concept of obsession just like at one time we had to rethink the concept of possession.
The most terrible thing is that damn fog. Its windows blink. Hardly is there time for complete coherence when the window shuts back down, again leaving you floundering till the next blink.
Oh well.
I wish I could confidently state whether last night was a moment of unbidden clarity or just an insomnia riddled mind wandering through its own cobweb infested corridors. It is the sort of thing that usually manifests itself when thoughts go freewheeling without pattern or definition. When the body prays for rest and the mind retorts, "Rest? What the devil do you mean rest? I am like the heart. I rest, you die."
So walking through that semi-opaque fog, a space opened up briefly, allowing the vision to gallop far and wide instead of the halting uncertainty that hinders progress through all manner of fogs.
It is easy to call something an obsession. Indeed, it is not merely easy, more often than not it is the most convenient label to tack on to some things in other people.
But what if you stop a moment and actually consider the matter. Somewhere deep inside there sits this mechanism that we call instinct. A wholesome yet not always reliable entity that seems to be completely independent from logic and causality. It does not reason, it leaps. The mind may think a myriad things in a flash and still continue routine tasks, but instinct has a speed that could make light envious if a competition ever arose between the two.
That, however, is an insufficient explanation. Instinct does not work over decades (not mine anyway). There is something deeper. An understanding which, like instinct, is free from so-called reality because reality is only that which is now. This thing, whatever it might be, is so primal and seems (repeat, seems) to have gone overlooked for so long that no one ever bothered bestowing a moniker on it.
It resembles instinct so closely that apart from the anomaly of the temporal distance over which the two work they might be one. The closest analog that comes to mind is a microscope and telescope, one sees near and the other far, and no one can see too near or too far without their aid.
So this thing creates a strong push towards something, a push that can outlive the corrosive power of time itself. One might struggle with it now and then (eventually everything involves some sort of struggle, I guess), but though it may quiet down, it never truly goes away. Time passes, the push reasserts itself. Again and again until it turns into a kind of dull ache that you simply learn to live with.
The pattern seems so meaningless and yet sometimes a glimpse will flit by suggesting it is perhaps not so bereft of said quality after all.
This invisible push appears to have been steering a course in the background of life that might have led to different vistas if certain things had fallen into different slots (which, of course, they did not and now they cannot). A strange push that pushes back all the harder if you try to push back. A push that starts sending out warning signals as if some sort of instinct inhabiting it had indicated that allotted time was going by too fast. "Get it done quick", it warns in haste, "you idled away for so long without heeding me and now there is precious little time left. But whatever is left, do be quick."
The more this pattern is observed, the more clarity descends on the truth that it is quite likely we know more than we think we know. Not something nascent but rather something ancient with the amassed wisdom of all the time it has been around. Something that knows where we tend to doubt. Something that does while we hesitate. Something that is always where we merely pass through.
So the question that arises is whether it is an obsession if someone is unknowingly following this push, not even knowing there is a push, only this insatiable mad drive for an unknown something (well, there might be concrete objects too).
I feel that we need to rethink the concept of obsession just like at one time we had to rethink the concept of possession.
The most terrible thing is that damn fog. Its windows blink. Hardly is there time for complete coherence when the window shuts back down, again leaving you floundering till the next blink.
Oh well.
