I don’t always know which side of the river I am on.

It comes up in my dreams a lot. Confusions between similar things, things seeming to divide and overlap on their own, not know whether I am looking at the opposite shore or whether I am there. Watching myself do things, and yet, still being the one doing them. A sense of the infinite fractal tree of possibilities of the future, where choices lead every which way into the future, and a sense of sadness that I will only ever – that I can only ever – live one path through that forest of options.

I’m only one person, after all.

One person with one life and one point of view and one trip through life. I supposed it says something about my unusual mental state that this bothers me. I want to do everything, see everything, look at things from every possible point of view.

But I can’t, so my combination of deep insight into human nature and vivid imagination will have to do.

I have never had any problem. putting myself in someone else’s shoes. At least, not since I was in Grade Four and realized that everything people do make sense to them. After that, the jump to realizing that other people have their own lives just like me but different – that every person is as valid and real a person as I am – was easy.

That’s still a fun one to contemplate – truly contemplate – when I feel like blowing my own mind. To imagine even one person’s totality as being equal to what I know to be my own is staggering. To repeat the exercise seven billion more times is nigh on impossible – but it can be fun to try now and then.

For me, that leads inexorably to humanism. The common element in all of us is our humanity. Not just in the literal biological sense. But also in the spiritual sense. Once you accept not merely the knowledge of this shared humanity but the deep down emotional truth of it, judging others becomes more difficult because you know that, like you, they are on a journey not even they truly understand and their actions are motivated by things unseen and unknown.

This effect on judgment can be hard for people to accept when they start to apply to the judgments and hatreds that are important to themselves. Judgments like “my parents did a terrible job of raising me” or “the divorce was all THEIR fault” or “it’s not my fault that my kids are lazy and badly behaved – I do the best that I can” can be incredibly important to people’s self-image and self-esteem, and I would never suggest people are somehow no good unless they rip those elements out of their psyche.

That would be far too judgmental of me.

And I am no paragon of it either. For me, it’s the direction I wish to go, but I don’t actually expect to get there. To me, that’s what it means to have ideals. They don’t provide a roadmap to an established goal.

They are just directions to self-improvement.

Anyhow, when the true acceptance of the humanity of others makes judgment more difficult, it opens the mind to truly understanding others without all that judgment in the way. Then you can see the world through eyes other than your own, spiritually speaking.

Given that unusual point of view of mine, it’s not a surprise that I have a certain amount of confusion as to who and where I am sometimes. And why I need help focusing. That’s why I am so mission oriented. When I have a clear goal in mind, I have a focal point for the kaleidoscopic scintillation of my endlessly searching mind.

My inner world is so demanding and distracting. I wish I could just empty it out and have some peace of mind now and then.  Not only would it give my poor overworked circuits time to cool off and rest, but it would make dealing with the real world so much easier.

It’s like I am always at a loud party straining to hear what the person on the phone is saying to me. It’s so exhausting.

In theory, meditation performs that function. At least, that’s my theory of it. Meditation teaches you to shut down all those background mental processes that you don’t even know are running and in doing so, lets you mind truly truly rest.

I’m saying “true” and “truly: a lot today. I wonder what I truly mean by it.

Maybe once you finally finish the task of force-quitting all those background programs and achieve a state of unified, simplified, harmonized consciousness, the relief is so profound and the sudden insight of such scale that the only word we can use is “enlightenment”.

It all sounds great on paper. But I have a lot of psychological issues which fuel the shark-like restlessness of my mind and so far in life, I have not been able to tame my monkey-mind enough to do more than lightly dabble in meditation.

I have too much of the problem meditation solves to solve it. Catch-22.

The real barrier, though, is the one that keeps me from getting exercise. I know that at least half and possibly much more of the problem is that I have all this energy that my depression, obesity, and sleep apnea get in the way.

Especially the depression. I have said before that madness is when you know for certain that doing a thing will make you happier and yet still finding yourself unable to do it.

I know damned well that if I got more exercise, I would be calmer, more focused, and a lot happier. All that excess energy demands expression and when it doesn’t get it, it turns into the energy source for anxiety and depression.

But I still can’t make myself exercise, because exercise hurts. And when I am exercising, I don’t have all my usual psychological defenses at hand and that makes me feel exposed and hounded and scared.

Or at least, that’s what I think will happen. I could be dead wrong and find that the energy release as well as muscular tension release makes me feel wonderful.

I guess I will never know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.