happy valentine's day, pretend everything i said was a lie
i don't think it was, but this is important to consider:
this will be short: there’s theory & there’s practice.
1 February 2024 I’ve been feeling so Mary’s room. If Mary exists in a black and white room but knows everything there is to know about color— despite having never experienced it— will Mary gain new knowledge by going out into the world? That’s the traditional question presented in the thought experiment; it regards whether or not the world is purely physical— to which I disagree. Mary would experience something new. But here’s the thing that I am hung up on… is Mary satisfied in that room? Doesn’t she wonder? And does she ever doubt what she does know? Suppose Mary knows everything about color and also accepts that the world is not purely physical— does Mary feel like knowing everything was worth it? If we assign more dimensionality to Mary, the whole question changes… and I guess we’re back to Sisyphus in a way. Can you be happy by simply knowing everything there is to know about happiness? Can you Love by simply knowing Love? That’s where I am now. And I accept that real life rarely presents this cathartic 180 from black and white to full UV spectrum… it’s just a matter of accepting I know nothing…
Mary enters a prismatic world and grieves, I think. I would grieve. Because carrying the burden of ‘knowing everything’ is more than our mortal bodies were made for… and in that shift (out of her room and into the real world) it all dissolves. It all dissolves at the crossroads of experience and feeling and Mary would undoubtedly be attached to what she knew. She will think ‘but this is how it should’ve gone! These are the possible ways it could’ve gone.’ and none of those ways will happen.
I love thinking about love. It’s maybe too much. Obsessive even. It’s just… all roads lead to Rome Love, I fear. (What’s your Roman Empire… love~)
But I sit here and pour my heart out and the act is romantic but look at us: we’re standing in a circle around a mass of bloody muscle tissue. It’s morbid, really. I have to remind myself to put it all back where it came from. Let the heart beat in the comfort of its own cavity; that is much nicer than watching it rot for the metaphor.
Despite everything I have come to learn about Love, I do not float around on a daily basis surrendering to the tender hand of the universe. Or rather, I know that the hand of the universe does not always choose tenderness. I try not to take it personally.
I have thought my way back to the beginning of it all and it turns out that I will always know nothing. And that’s what’s best. My experiences propelled me into this deep contemplation about love and romance and it’s made irreversible changes to my entire being. I will never go back to the things I thought I knew, so won’t I always be at the foot of this infinite mountain? Everything I know now is subject to the same fate as everything I knew then and over and over again. I have shared with you everything I know about Love right now. Everything I believe in is right now. I relinquish the power to speak on what I may know tomorrow.
and Love in particular is slippery. Maybe I lose it, I don’t want to be consumed by waiting.
I have. I’ve tried. Waiting. And I have gone through the waiting protocol; serve yourself first. Be Love for yourself. Nurture yourself. Spend time with yourself. Self-care. Self-love. Self-acceptance. You know the whole thing. In all honesty, it gets boring. And there’s no end to this self-help revolution. You do it, you believe in it, then you say “ok I’m done, now what?” and they shame you for having the audacity to declare that. Well. I do love myself, it was challenging, but I do believe myself when I say it so it must be true enough… now what? And I think that’s part of it. We never address how susceptible we are to stagnation when we decide we are always incomplete... always in need of figuring it out. There is the whole practice part— that’s the infinity. The random number generator of life begs us to take a lap. How can we keep trying to figure it all out if we’ve never even seen the theory applied?
back to Mary:
All I do in thought is grow attached. Even when I contemplate detachment, I attach myself to the probabilities; all the various ways I can map Brownian motion. Over and over again, I’d wonder why it still hurt (if I expected nothing, why does it feel like betrayal?). It’s because there is no use in knowing it all without feeling. In her black and white room, Mary has never felt a deep orange homesickness, a bright purple friendship, a powdery blue love. She might toil over the concepts, but I fear they will only teach her an emptiness.
i’ll close on this…
It is exciting to learn how to lead with Love after absolute disorder… but I am starting to understand that Love also follows. I am allowed to forge ahead first.
I have made myself insecure over this idea: can I remove Love from the foreground and expect it to remain? But I’ve assuaged that insecurity with trust; with each new day I check that I am still familiar with my Love. As long as I am, I can be sure it’s a Love that persists.
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