The Abyss of Experience

 

The Abyss of Experience

Sometimes living, or the life we undertake, is no more than a dream of the past.  One day we arise with some wonderful plan, work towards it, look at its many aspects, then realize it is not possible, and try to forget, but its momentum is still there.  How often has such an event, a moment of deep regret, or a moment of overwhelming joy, affected the way something in the future is reacted to?  We are in a bad mood and so everyone else must suffer; we are happy and everyone else smiles back.  Life is an ongoing series compiled one upon the other, interacting, falling away, creating new outcomes, but binding them all into a habituated pattern.  Yet there comes a moment when we really try to work out that wonderful plan, really try to experience it for all it is worth, but somehow we always come up short, or indeed approximate it with something we have already experienced.  The new path around the mountain is interspersed with memories of the old, however neither one is ever really there.  Nietzsche said something of this sort: stare into the abyss long enough and the abyss will stare into you.  What moment then have we actually experienced or fully realized?  What moment set everything in motion, blurring the lines between reality and mind?  Maybe we do not need to experience anything at all, but only allow the abyss of this experience to find us.

Douglas Thornton