Many things about life excite me, but many more frighten me, make me sad, and yes, sometimes, it makes me happy.
Life is an adventure to delve in, but why run? Let's reflect on what it gives us every day, what it has to offer.
So, will you take a stroll with me?
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The Mind is a Jungle
No matter how poor your sense of direction is, there’s always that one area you know like the back of your hand. It may not be a particularly popular or important area—but you know it, nonetheless. It is yours.
You, the navigator, know its twists and turns, its pitfalls and bends. Given enough time living there, even the most puzzling of labyrinths can be turned inside out and memorized to the finest detail. Our memory of where we live is base instinct—to know means to survive, and it is something that we as humans do well, subconsciously and otherwise. The human body—as well as the human mind—are capable of herculean feats, should the time be so desperate to call for them.
It is with this fact in mind that I find the Human Mind to be one of the greatest ironies of our existence. The mind is a powerful thing that teaches us all that makes us—our emotions, the way we rationalize decisions, and yes, especially the way we figure out problems, such as a maze. The mind, if pressed enough, can imprint the greatest of maps into the consciousness—we are extremely good at finding our way around the world.
Knowing that, I wonder why it is that, when the mind grants us such power—like a blazing torch in the darkness of ignorance, it also exposes us to great mystery, great fear. This is what I wonder…how can you memorize a maze that always changes? Suffice to say, our minds are one of the most complex mazes out there—and despite how long we are left with it, we can never truly know it—we can never truly know ourselves. After all, can you really know that which teaches you to know?
It frankly baffles me how drastically we can change from one night to the next. All it takes is a small series of events to make that snap, to change everything—and then suddenly, every tunnel, every bend and road in our maze of a mind—changes, changes completely and without warning.
However, the mind isn’t simply a maze. It’s a dangerous place that causes you to think terrible things. No matter how kind of a person you are, anyone can reach their limit, anyone can get to that point—and then it happens, snap. Gone. Your mind goes self-destructive, belligerent, reclusive. The mind isn’t a maze—it’s a jungle, complete with traps, dangerous and mysterious creatures, and with no end in sight.
Like a jungle, the mind can be a beautiful, awe-inspiring place. The most wonderful dreams sprout from our minds, the kindest of thoughts, and the greatest mirth. Soft rainfall from a lush canopy, the smell of dew filling your nostrils, a light mist rolling about in the morning air as the sun beats down sporadically down the treeline. Birds—forever out of sight—sing their songs invisibly to the heavens, to nothing. Grass and exposed roots crunch softly under your shoes, and your skin tingles with the warm, but moist sensation of the temperate climate. Everything—and really, everything—is truly beautiful.
The sun falls—oh, does it fall quickly. The exotic, but familiar noises you once heard die and fade as darkness sets in. The air is still and extremely humid—suffocating. You can’t think straight, you find yourself uncomfortable no matter which way you try to rest. Once in a while, the silence is broken—not with conversation or song, but a shriek, a roar. Noises of fear or intimidation, primal sounds that make your hairs stand on end, sends your body to stiffness, and sets your senses off to extreme alertness. Every noise is noticed, every sound is a potential threat. There is no respite, only you, you and your survival against the world. Everything is out to get you, and you can barely see in front of you. The rain begins to fall slowly, and then pours. Your clothes, already wet from the humidity, soak fully through to your skin. You can feel your bones shaking against your body, your teeth chattering like a death rattle. The droplets feel like ice, each one threatening to pull you down.
You try to find comfort, try to find shelter, but every time you do, another noise sets you back on your feet, and that constant unsettling discomfort, it keeps you moving, as if your body is unconsciously trying to escape it. You need to move, you need to get out of here…you need to survive.
This is the jungle of our mind, and it is both Hades and the Elysian Fields. Nothing is assured, or stable, even if it may seem that way. Anything can upset a balance. Our mind is wired to find that balance again, but we do a grand job of sending it teetering off into destruction more than ever. Is it our society? Is it simply the dangerous evolution of the human mind? I don’t know the answers, but I do know its dangers—I face their potential every day—and so do you.
However, at the end of the day, when night falls and danger rises, what else can you do but move on? What else can you do but continue living, if only for the promise of a better tomorrow? And in our happiest times, what use is there worrying about the dangers ahead? Can’t one simply sit and smell life? Can’t one simply close their eyes and let the kind, but mercurial world take them to restful slumber?
My eyes haven’t seen such slumber in years, but I keep going, anyway—because I know everyone is on the same road, the same road that will hopefully lead to something new, something better. The mind is a jungle, yes, but our mind is still ours—in the end, we must decide if we will travel blindly in its depths or become its navigators, the brave explorers of our consciousness. It is a daunting task, but we are also wired to survive, to adapt—it is in our nature as humans, and that’s a powerful thought.
Of Knowing
We endeavor to know the people around us, to varying extents. How often have you wondered about your friend, enemies, and even complete strangers? Look at them as they stand there talking to their friends, watch as they read an article on their macbooks, see as they breathe, live life—and you want to know, who are they?
People talk about themselves all the time—the way they see themselves, what they treasure and what they dislike, but we don’t listen, we make every conclusion on our own. It is human nature, and yet, it is such a frustrating nature that we face in the Information Age.
Where we are used to googling an answer or clicking through some pages to see what we’re looking for in text as plain as this, we are faced with the question of our fellow humans. We hear you speak, and yet, we know so little. A voice only says so much. And your face, no matter how long we stare, your eyes betray no secrets, the curve of your lips offer no true impression of who you are, only what you are showing.
And so, we hoard and treasure that which we find, that which we discover. An argument heard muffled through a door, a conversation intoxicated with emotion or drink, or maybe something as simple as the slamming of a book. Humanity, you frustrating and beautiful Gordian Knot, how you enrage, perplex, and yes, enthrall us every single day. For how can we truly know each other when we are still mystified by ourselves?
Sometimes, life feels stagnant enough that you can feel the invisible bars of a cage trapping you in your lifestyle. When I feel like this, I think about where I was five years ago, and where I am now.
We fly slowly.
But we fly.
The Astronaut (Short Story 2)
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The soft, mechanical chirp rang through the ears of the two men drifting in the blackness of space, the only thing between them is a strange, cylindrical container made of light-weight titanium, a red transmitter decorating its head, and the source of the intermittent beeps. Each time a sound was made, a red flash dazes both pairs of eyes looking so closely at it.
“Almost done, Don?” one of the men calls out impatiently from his suit, tilting his body around the machine as his colleague works on it. His voice crackles through the comm where it would be received in the other man’s suit. The man speaking, Blake, was ready to finish up with his maintenance shift and head back to the station in time to eat lunch with a young woman he met in the Engineering Deck several weeks prior. He was young, olive-skinned, and wiry. His heavily-padded fingers rattle against the transmitter, causing the whole machine’s chassis to shake against the patter.
Don, unlike Blake, is an older, patient man. It was likely why he was always sent out on maintenance with Blake instead of someone else. He had calm, green eyes and was just beginning to show signs of gray in his brown head of hair. Don didn’t particularly mind being pulled out of the station with Blake, though. Despite being around many of the hundreds of space stations that were near Earth or some of the surrounding, larger asteroids, Don always enjoyed the dead serenity of deep space. He could hear what Blake was saying because of a receiver in his ear. He even heard the rattling of Blake’s fingers against the transmitter because Don was presently surrounded with its infrastructure, checking the wiring. However, if a gun was fired directly beside his helmet or if a huge explosion went off in the station only a quarter mile away,
Don would be completely ignorant of the noise. Sound is created by the vibration of molecules—but since there were no molecules in deep space, there was no sound.
“Don’t you find my job interesting, Blake?” Don asks in his peaceful, quiet voice—so soft that his comm barely picks up the sound waves.
“Checking for circuit breaks? Yeah, fascinating,” Blake replies caustically, rolling his eyes and stopping his rattling as he gripped the handles of the transmitter, built solely for the purpose for engineers such as himself to grapple on to while floating around in space.
“That’s not my job. If you talked to a guy who paints, you wouldn’t tell him his job was to put color on a canvas…” Don begins, pausing momentarily to shut the transmitter’s control panel and pull himself away from the machine, activating the propulsion pack built into the back of his suit as he begins to float back to the station. Only does he continue when he sees Blake following suit and floating his way to catch up to him. “…You’d tell him he was a painter. You see me doing what I do, well, I’d call myself an astronaut,” Don continues in complacency, his soft voice containing the slightest hints of cheer as he lazily kicks one of his legs pointlessly in the ebon void, making a complete flip in the zero-gravity space before returning to his original position, still floating towards the ever-nearing space station that housed roughly twelve-thousand people.
“That’s different,” Blake responds, planting his feet firmly on the station’s hull once he came in reach, the thick, titanium boots quickly magnetizing against the outer sheet of the station so that he could gain balance and walk freely upon the stations surface. However, Don doesn’t make his way to one of the numerous airlocks to enter the station. Instead, he simply plants his feet down and slowly settles down to sit on his behind, crossing his arms around his legs and gazing out at the nothingness of space—nothing but stars and distant asteroids to reflect off of helmet’s golden-hued visor.
“Different…” he echoes, as if contemplating the very meaning of the word before saying more. “You know, there aren’t many astronauts anymore…but at the same time, there are thousands. Hundreds of thousands, actually.”
Blake stops in his tracks, turning his head as fair as it could go to give a sidelong glance at Don’s form. Any thought of meeting that girl was quickly ejected from his mind as he filled his head with a new objective: To get to the bottom of Don’s weird head.
Don continues, not bothering to turn his head. He knew Blake’s type well enough. “Don’t believe me?”
“I think you’re crazy,” Blake says frankly, standing beside Dom, looming over him.
“There’s only a couple dozen of you astronauts left, anymore. You’re a dying lot. Only in history books.”
“Well!” Don says, laughing. It took Blake aback that he would be humored at the comment instead of offended, as he had hoped. “Back in my day, Blake, when I was a kid, it was pretty normal for little guys like me to want to be a big, strong astronaut one day. If you asked someone from the twenty-first century what an astronaut did, they’d tell you they’re guys who go to space and do ‘space stuff”. And if you asked an astronaut what their goal in life was, it was to put life in space—something that’s long been accomplished, now. So, you see, there are tons of astronauts.”
“No, I don’t see. It’s still just you and a handful of other geezers.”
Don snorts, briefly casting a skeptical, fatherly look up at Blake. “You ask any of the people from my time what they’re looking at when they see us, they’d respond with ‘two astronauts doing space stuff.’” Don points a thumb back at the station looming over behind them. ”In that station there are brokers and lawyers, technicians and doctors, plumbers and actors. Yet, if you lined them all up in a station window and brought someone in from my days to look at them all through the glass, they’d say “My, what a lot of astronauts. You see, Blake, simply being in space in our time made you an astronaut—and every time we managed to do it, we got really excited, said it was one step closer to the next frontier…It’s funny.”
“How’s it funny?” Blake asks, sinking down next to Don, listening to him as his eyes briefly catch a nearby, floating space-pebble.
“None of us astronauts really figured we’d be erased when we finally ‘did’ manage that final frontier. Now that everyone’s in space, what’s an astronaut? What’s their expertise?
Everyone knows of the risks, everyone knows how to handle themselves—and you have engineers like yourself to fix mechanical problems and ordinary pilots to fly shuttles. So what is it that an astronaut is to ‘you’, Blake?”
The two sit in silence at length, their forms just barely illuminated by the distant, distant sun that appeared a few thousand miles too far from home.
“Astronauts are all of us. Astronauts are none of us,” Don concludes after a while, answering his own question. “By finally getting what we ‘wanted’, we essentially wiped ourselves out. People may read about us, sure, but they won’t know us as astronauts, they’ll know us as bright people. If history had people whose job titles were ‘walker’ or ‘bends down to pick up shiny objects’, no one would really take that seriously, because it’s something people already do all of the time. Astronauts are the same way. Going to space used to be magical, now it’s as ordinary as going to the lavatory,” he says with an almost sad sigh, the slightly muffled tone of his voice vibrating in the depths of Blake’s receiver, who had fallen deathly silent throughout Don’s explanation.
Blake lowers his periwinkle eyes down to his white, padded hands. He flexes the fingers, squeezes them, pretends to hear the sound of the airtight fabric squeaking against itself. His gaze then drifts back up to space—to the vast expanse of blackness, the almost unnatural way that stars seemed to surround them from every direction, distant planets and moons sometimes little more than a flicker in space. He was suddenly poignantly aware of the beating of his heart, the flowing of blood through his body, and how quickly exposure to space could extinguish both of these things, nearly instantaneous crystallization. The past thoughts of any gender interest feel as distant as Earth, light years away, and every dealing of his life as insignificant as the tiniest pebble floating on endlessly through deep space.
“Everyone is an astronaut,” Don says, gazing out blindly under his visor at the void.
Blake gazes at Don. He no longer saw the older man, but instead simply the white suit. He pictures that suit walking across a barren landscape, slapping an American flag deep into the alien earth and standing behind a backdrop of space that looked almost beautiful, heart-wrenching in the romantic’s eyes. He sees the interminable, tenacious will of Don in his golden visor, not in his eyes. For some reason, now that he looked at the astronaut, space seemed a lot bigger, a lot more dangerous and exciting than Blake had thought it out to be all of his life.
It was in staring at Don’s rocky figure, practically chiseled into the very station, that Blake finally came to realize his own truth. “No, they aren’t,” Blake says simply, staring at Don.
The people in the station would never be astronauts, no matter how much they floated. He would never be an astronaut, no matter how many things he fixed. Being an astronaut wasn’t about a job or a role in life, being an astronaut was about a life, a philosophy all on its own. Being an astronaut meant pursuing space when all others saw it as a dream, it meant attacking and conquering that infinite, deadly black expanse and being happy even when surrounded by it. A person like Blake, who went from day to day thinking about anything to keep himself away from the boredom of space, would never truly understand Don for not only who he was, but what he represented.
No, most people in space certainly weren’t astronauts. Not anymore. It is true, by definition, they were all astronauts. These people who sold clothing and stared at stocks and installed holograms over the depressing windows that depicted the expanse of space would never know what it meant to be an astronaut, what it still means.
None of them would ever be astronauts.
None of them would be Don, Don the Astronaut.
Hey guys, sorry its been a long time since I’ve posted, but I’m planning on actively restarting my efforts to posting up stories/pictures that you may or may not enjoy. The one I’m about to link is something I made a few years ago that just kinda stuck to me as one of my best. I hope you like it and catch its meaning.
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Fireflies (Short Story 1)
When I was really young, I always loved to dash out of my house and into the night, with no purpose other than to just chase fireflies. Their brief, magical flashes enticed my eyes to follow their every floating movement, leaving me to try and predict where their yellowish bulbs would appear next. I used to think they were fairies, born from water droplets in the Meherrin River that flowed through my backyard and way out of sight. That river was just as mysterious as my firefly friends. I thought the river went on around the whole Earth, coming back full circle just at my house. I was always with my fireflies, laying back on dew-laden grass on a sleepy evening and watching the river. I lay there and dreamt of circling the whole world on a raft, just on the water, with nothing but my fireflies to guide me in the meandering river when it was dark.
The fireflies were a window to a magical place. No matter what I was doing or where I was, I could count on my fireflies to be there to give me an adventure in a dreamscape. The fireflies led me into another world. If I was waiting at the doctor’s office, I could be exploring a cave, picking up any of the instruments I found and crawling through the strange-smelling halls of the hospital. If I was at daycare, I could be flying a plane by just raising my arms and running around as fast as my legs could carry me.
As the years passed, my eyes got better at predicting where the fireflies would show up next, and I noticed how I saw them more often during some months than others. One day, I caught one in a jar and brought it inside my house. It just looked like a bug to me. I still went outside to see my fireflies, but I found myself sitting in the grass less often.
Life went on, and I saw less and less of those glowing bugs. I was getting taller, much taller—and being so far from the ground, it was difficult to see my little, golden fireflies. Eventually, I couldn’t see them at all as my body grew so tall that I was above the clouds—clouds made of school, of learning. For instance, I learned that the Meherrin River in my backyard didn’t go around the world, but only about 92 miles. It couldn’t stretch past two states, much less reach to the rim of the pacific, the poles beyond, and back around.
Years flew faster than my legs at daycare ever could. The clouds grew thicker: High School, Responsibility, College, Work. I learned that my fireflies created their eerie, sporadic glow through bioluminescence, not that I ever saw them anymore—I was far too busy—far too mature. A family, children. Taxes and promotions, moving and settling. Before I knew it, my children called me daddy, then dad, then sir. And faster than a firefly could spark its organs into illumination, I was…old.
“Grandpa,” I think I remember a young child calling to me. I wasn’t paying much attention. Now, I simply spent my days in bed, watching the window outside and wondering where my life went. My family was around me now. Children, grandchildren, and all. Tiny fingers clung to my sheets, pairs upon pairs of worried eyes looked at me as if I were in a jar. I grew sad, I wondered why my fireflies had left me this way. For days, my eyes stared out at the window, not sure what to look for—like some sort of child’s curious gaze, gleaming for adventure.
On a particularly cold, dreary night, I could have sworn before I closed my eyes that I saw a single, bright gleam of a firefly outside my window. I sighed happily, realizing how foolish I was as I…closed my eyes. My fireflies never left me, I just didn’t bother to look.
Somehow, I could finally rest with ease, knowing that my life had a color, a meaning. It was golden, just like my little fireflies.
((Breakdown: When I was in High School, I entered a lot of forensics competitions for prose fiction. In my area, I was the only student that didn’t take excerpts from existing books. Instead, I decided to feature my own writing—which was a credit to my scores from the judges, considering how poor of a public speaker I tend to be.
Fireflies is a lot about a trade-off that few people really consider. Remember when you were a kid and went to bowling alleys and got to see performances on stages? Where did the pins go when you struck them with the bowling ball? How did actors on stage so rapidly change scenes, how were they so bright, and how can you hear them so loudly?
In our collective childhoods, we knew next to nothing about anything. Everything was an exciting mystery, from television shows to what grownups did on a daily basis. As we get older, we learn more and more things about life, we grow both in wisdom and intelligence. However, have you ever considered the sacrifice? For every childhood “secret” we unlock about life, we lose a bit of our innocence, of our blissful ignorance.
Music is beautiful, but it was mystifyingly beautiful when I knew nothing about instruments or notes. After a point, we learn so much that we forget about how we thought as children—we only remember what we did, if that. Now more than ever we’re caught in the rushing tides of life, we are thrown headfirst in our educations and our society to get into a good college, get good grades, and get a good job.
Fireflies is about knowing that even though you get older, you can still be a child at heart. Love life for what it is, and reward yourself by looking at things through a child’s playful eye instead of the calculated ways we see things now—you just might have fun)).
Roads
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where my life’s headed. I suppose at some point in everyone’s life (I imagine mostly at college level) we start to get the “bigger picture” of our lives—or at least wonder what it is. For even a few moments, we stop worrying about the grade we’re going to get next week or what this or that person thinks about you and really wonder to yourself: “Where am I going”? It’s a timeless statement that life is complex. However, I always think back to what Einstein once said: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I live by those words, and the gordian knot that is life is no exception to this way of thinking. To be specific, I believe that anyone’s life can be likened to a road. It’s a journey we all take, but our travels of life are not as similar as the statement would imply. Everyone’s road is different—some are turbulent and cracked, some smooth and gently rolling—while others can seem like a constant uphill battle. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably had experiences in your life that have made your road smooth and happy, as well as experiences that have made the sojourn seem impossible, unforgiving—and most commonly—lonely. Why do you travel your road? Is it to reach a destination? Do you enjoy it simply for the trip?…Do you even notice you’re on it? We’re so caught up in ourselves that it’s rare we really stop in our turbulent lives to look down at our worn shoes and inspect the gravel on the road below us—that road that has been our one true companion since we started that journey when we were born. No matter how desperate our lives become—no matter how much you feel like you don’t have an aim in the world, that road will always be there, and in our panic, we sometimes forget that there will always be a path for us to follow. Still, don’t take this note as some sort of thesis on life that is somehow tangled into optimistic drivel. That simply isn’t the case. Not that optimism is bad—but life, regardless of how much we argue with it, simply refuses to always be good. My life’s taken a lot of odd twists and turns in its length, but something I find interesting is not focusing on my road, but that of others. A person’s road is constantly changing—but if you simply watch them, talk to them—your roads merge, for that moment. For that period that you are together with strangers, friends, and yes, loved ones, you travel on the same road, and despite all the secrets we as humans keep, all of the cooped up hidden feelings and emotions that run through our chaotic brains, there are no secrets on the road—the only reason for that is because there are no truths, either. Sound complex? Allow me to simplify (if I may). You see a man walking on a road. This is obvious, and therefore not a lie because the man is obviously walking on the road. Unless he approached you and said “Hello, I was not walking on that road,” there could certainly be no dishonesty to the situation. So, therefore, walking on the road is truth, right? Wrong. A man is walking on the road. If someone were to put their hand on your shoulder and say “That man is walking on the road,” it would indeed be the truth as you can see it for yourself. However, there is no truth in footsteps. An act, when put into a particular context, can make something true or false. But an act alone? It’s irrelevant, it’s only an act—and that is what I find truly beautiful about merging roads with other people. Footsteps go “Tap, tap, tap” not “Two plus two is four, the sun appears in the day, and the meaning of life is eggs.” No matter how much someone may let you down or lie to you, every moment you spend with them is a moment that you walk on the same road…When I consider a seemingly-infinite trail ahead of an enemy of mine, they seem much smaller, and likewise, any issues I have with them seem fittingly miniscule. When we walk roads with people, we know more about them through their roads—and sometimes—we find out a bit about our own. I’ve met people who jog on the gravel with full suits—only their careers on their minds. I’ve met others who would prefer to simply sit on the grass next to the road as they simply enjoy life—and I’ve met people that have gingerly touched their roads with fingertips, curious eyes eager to gleam some sort of meaning out of themselves—their lives. The roads of our lives are complex, and aren’t meant to be understood; and yet, I relish in the wisdom of my ignorance. If I simply know about the roads, I’m all the more conscious of the path I take, and the choices I make. Like I’ve said…my road’s been cruel and kind to me in the same day, and its mercurial tendencies are known to all. Sometimes, I’ve wanted to run over my road. Other times, I fancied having so many people on my road that I couldn’t even see the ebon path beneath my feet…and sometimes, I want nothing more than to have just one more pair of footsteps on my road, and a hand to hold to its end. Roads plot our lives as much as we do. I once thought I had lost the map to it all, to the direction in which I was headed, but tonight I realized that I’m still on the path…as long as I exist, I can never fall from it. I’m not interested in what could be thought of as a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ path, only that it is being traveled, that it is being experienced for what it truly is in the end…an adventure. So, I wonder…what’s your road like?
