My Mind Moves In Wretched Little Circles

My mind moves in wretched little circles, trying its best to avoid its fate, trying as hard as it can to avoid what it never can avoid…

 

If you could watch my mind moving in its wretched little circles you’d get so fed up, so frustrated by the sheer futility of it. You’d want to scream out loud. Maybe you would scream out loud – I know I do sometimes! I scream out loud on a regular basis… This is a futility my mind is – apparently – completely blind to. Either it is blind or it is afraid. Quite possibly it is simply too terrified to allow itself to witness the futility of what it is attempting to do. To witness this would be to see that it cannot escape its fate and that is the one thing it can never allow itself to see. Its nature is such that it will go on fighting right to the bitter end, and I imagine that it will be a very bitter end indeed. The phrase ‘kicking and screaming’ comes to mind…

 

My mind is forever moving in the same wretched little circles. It knows no other life, no other way of being. It is trying with great perseverance to avoid its fate, trying to avoid what it never can avoid. Did you ever see anyone avoid their fate? That’s a stupid question really since if it is your fate then you can’t avoid it. It wouldn’t be your fate otherwise. Your fate is what has already happened without perhaps you realizing that it has already happened. You’re slow to catch on. You’re slow to catch on but you’ll get there in the end. You’re already there in fact, you just don’t know it yet.

 

Your realization isn’t strictly necessary. Your fate doesn’t need you to be cogniscent of it in order for it to function as your fate! You can be as slow to catch on as you like. You can take a holiday in the Azores if you like. Your fate is that which has already happened to you. Your fate is that which has already happened to you whether or not you are aware of the fact that is has. It has already been accomplished and there was never a time when it had not been already accomplished. Your fate never will have ‘not already been accomplished’.

 

I didn’t mean for this to turn into an argument for determinism. Maybe some things aren’t predetermined. Quite possibly they’re not, but I’m not talking about those things. I’m talking about the particular fate that my mind is trying to avoid without ever admitting that it is trying to avoid anything. If it did admit to trying to avoid its fate then this would of course be the same as acknowledging this fate and this it will never do. So my mind has hit upon a tactic – it avoids without admitting that it is avoiding, it moves in petty little circles without ever allowing itself to see that it is doing so.

 

Maybe its nature is such that it just can’t see the circles that it is forever travelling in. I’m prepared to entertain that as a possibility. Maybe it is trapped in a loop but somehow keeps on forgetting that it is – like a man with a bad memory who keeps on telling you the same old stories over and over again every time he meets you because he honestly can’t remember that he has already done so. That is a perfectly valid possibility. Or maybe my mind is just too terrified to admit that it is going around in circles. Maybe it’s just playing stupid so it doesn’t have to see the terrifying truth. It has two choices, you see. Either it faces the fate that it is forever trying to avoid (and as we have already said it really doesn’t want to do this), or it pretends to itself that it isn’t travelling around in futile little circles the whole time and kids itself that it is actually getting somewhere!

 

My money is on the second option: rather than confront the one thing in the world that it most wants not to confront, my mind has decided to pretend that the wretched little circles it is forever moving in are not wretchedly little circles at all, but are in fact the whole of what is possible in life. It creates a whole world out of its futile actions. Some vile cartoon-type world. It can then continue enacting and re-enacting its horrendously petty little routines forever, and be quite content. It doesn’t realize how appallingly stupid it is you see, so everything’s OK. This is the clever ruse that my mind has hit upon, I believe. I am in fact quite convinced of it. I would count this as a rather remarkable insight on my part. Not that it makes my life any easier – this awareness doesn’t actually help me in the least, come to think of it. I’d be a hell of a lot better off not knowing, to be honest…

 

 

 

 

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