First, the video I recorded yesterday :

Sorry for the fact that it starts out of nowhere. I had to trim it because the program I am using for video editing on the tablet has a five minute limit unless you shell out for the full version.

Which I am totally going to do. The program is called Viva Video and they seem to have cracked the problem of how to design a full featured yet user friendly video editor on an Android device. So far, I love it, love it, love it. I can do pretty much anything I can do with the big PC programs, and with comparable deftness.

I am not sure how to make something big and complicated with a lot of cuts with it yet, but I will figure it out.

Oh, and sorry for the “up my nose” angle. I thought putting my tablet flat on the table and peering down into it would make the thing more visually interesting. And I really thought I was a lot further from the camera than I was.

Oh well, the point was to do one. Tonight’s will be more fun and enriched. Might do a slideshow. Dunno yet.

That taken care of, on to our subject : I have been pondering the pros and cons of being water today. Or, put less cryptically, of being very, very flexible in a very specific way.

I have the kind of mind that easily seeps into the cracks and crevices of ideas. That ability to generate possibilities that fuels my insights and creativity (and option paralysis) allows me to see possibilities where others see none, and the malleability of my mind makes me very, very good at deducing the shape of the lock from the shape of the key.

This flexibility also allows me to flow over, around, or through things which would be major obstacles to others. I’m the guy who doesn’t even see the walls that constrain other people’s lives. It gives me the ability to go directly for the heart of the matter in terms of philosophy and creative problem solving. Mentally speaking, I can take the shortest distance between two points while others have to take the established path, which is anything but direct.

In that sense only, it’s like I am four dimensional. In the world of the mind, it can seem like I teleport. After all, what is teleportation but the appearance of having gone from point A to point B without traveling through the space in between?

Of course, I do travel through the space in between. I just take a path others cannot see.

This water-like mind also, I think, informs my deep sympathy. I can really understand people because my mind can flow into the cracks and seams of someone’s personality and get a really high resolution image of what makes them tick.

Think of it as making a mould of something. The thinner the liquid used to make the mould, the more detail will be preserved.

And I can make my mind very thin indeed.

So those are the good things. Now, the bad.

Water doesn’t hold its shape. It takes the shape of the container it’s in. And despite its strong desire to be free, it desperately needs a container not just to keep it contained, but to give it identity. It doesn’t know who it is without some kind of container to conform to.

And water does not move on its own. All that fluidity denies it any rigidity. It can’t hold together for long, and when it stops keeping itself together, then splash. Form is gone and I revert right back to being a puddle.

And then… all I can do is wait for something else to come along to give me form. At the same time, I have become very good at avoiding the very form which I seek.

Because I fear form as much as I crave it, if not more. To take form means to choose one of myriad possibilities I can see, and once you do that, you lose all the rest of the possibilities.

And with so many possibilities, how on Earth could anyone be confident they chose the right one?

Besides, the primitive part of my brain conflates loss of possibilities and being “trapped”. What if I chose the wrong thing and now I am stuck with it, and the situation calls for a totally different shape?

Tragically, this leads to me taking puddle form pretty much all of the time. And puddles don’t get a lot done.

Then there is the question of identity. When you can take so many shapes, which one is the real you? Like Clayface from Batman : The Animated Series, the flexibility precludes identity. Identity has to be something solid and stable within you, and my fluidity seems to actively resist the formation of anything approaching that level of persistence.

After all, we can’t have any limits to our mental maneuverability or we’ll be “trapped”, right?

It’s insane, with all that implies. The less safe I am, the more terrified I am of having to choose, and the more puddle-like I become. All possibility, no actualization. That’s what fuels my crippling escapism : I want to get away from the stressful situation so I can revert to being a total puddle again.

Only then can I calm down and feel safe, because I have all my possibilities back. The same possibilities that keep me from being able to choose things in life.

Life is about choices. Every decision we make means the death of a thousand possibilities, but it also creates a thousand new ones at the same time. Things become possible that you couldn’t even see until you made the decision.

And I can’t go around complaining how everything inside me falls apart when I am the one ruthlessly (and compulsively) disassembling them in the first place.

I need to remind myself to let things be solid in my mind. Make choices and stick with them. Stop trying to control outcomes and just live life according to my own happiness.

Follow your bliss, and all that crap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.