Bits of Thoughts

1

I was in a British Lit class in college once, with a really loopy Stanford-grade professor. He assigned us a research paper.

After we chose our broad topics and had done some light reading about them, he told us to spend 3 hours in an LSU library, on the floor where all the books on our topics were, and pull only books that had been published in the last 15 years. We had to have at least 5 of those sources--not necessarily sources we had to quote in the paper, either -- but what he was trying to make us do was compare the older, established-in-some-sense thoughts, with newer thoughts that sometimes challenged and reworked the earlier stuff.

And when I did that, I started thinking about writing papers differently. I started trying to poke holes in established research, including the newer stuff too. Before the end of my 3 hours, I had pieced together a legitimate, unique question that no source, even outside of my 3 (I searched for a long time) had never thought to ask. It was probably a shitty question, but I was pretty stoked about it, considering my topic was a piece of literature that scholars have been researching for over 800 years, and there I was, asking a question that centuries of academia hadn't.

He never intended to make us write the paper; it was just an exercise in critical thinking.

2

Mammals inhale what plants exhale, and mammals find sustenance in the offspring of plants. Plants find sustenance in mammalian excrement, and plants inhale what mammals exhale. This is symbiosis through a very delicate balance, and that balance did not always exist, nor will it always. Humans exist only in the frame of that balance...and I can say that basic biology and ecology, paired with my lack of belief that any of this was orchestrated, has made me appreciate my and your temporary existence in a way that the promise of eternal salvation never could. It's beautiful no matter what lens you look through, and it only gets more impressive when I allow myself to look through someone else's lens and see the same beauty.
It comes back to us, like we're looking in a mirror, and then there's this moment of oh my god, I understand why you believe what you do, and I'm even happier that you are you, and I am me, than I ever was before. We don't need to agree in order to be awestruck by what we are, or the fantastic unlikeliness of our thriving planet, floating in an ever-expanding void of light that we might never be able to measure.
My time is finite, and I don't want to waste precious minutes arguing about the origin of the universe when I know very well that the universe cannot confirm or deny it, when I know your view is every bit as beautiful as mine. I am grateful enough that I can share this night sky, this conversation, this epoch with you; and in this massive context, regardless of who put us here or if no one did, the meaning of life ebbs and flows with the tides so I will inevitably, episodically forget the meaning, and so will you. But just as inevitably, I will look at you one day and I'll see it -- not in you, but of you, around you -- and I will remember that it's around me, too. It hasn't always been, nor will it always be, and that either makes no difference in the present, or it makes all the difference...but in that moment, I can't make myself care enough about the answer to waste time asking the question.

Delusions of Grandeur

Sometimes, when I sit down to write, all I can think of is me, writing. When that happens, I usually don't end up writing anything, preferring instead to distract myself with Reddit, Facebook, or the world news I find in both places. For, like, hours.

Other times, I sit down to write and manage to forget about myself sitting down to write. Cool things end up happening after that -- I think of plots, wordplay, characterization. My characters, and oh how I love their pitfalls and redemptions. I go back in time and feel what 14 years old felt like, and I take those things and bring them to my notebook, who is always elated to get physical contact.

When I think of myself writing, I subconsciously elevate the importance of the act to a pedestal I can't reach; I defeat my pen before I pick it up.

When I forget about what I'm doing, everything seems so much less important; there is infinitely less pressure, and the page turns into a valuable playground that must never know what it's worth.