Letters to a Thought

 What ways are there of making sense of the world, and how can we measure their varying degrees of effectiveness? We paddle through life on a river of emotions. These emotions can be attributed to any number of things, from loving dolphins to despising floor lamps. Let us call the objects of considered in our attention at any given moment, the present stimuli. It may be unfair to attribute all drives to the vague term of "emotion", but no categories are perfect - let us pursue this until absurdity arises. Under this theory, things make a whole lot of sense: if we assume that an emotion can be attributed to any set of present stimuli (green, leafy foliage versus smiling faces of approval) with some being more salient to certain people than others (a botanist versus a comedian) this does not run counter to the milieu of individual tastes that crowd our melting pot. Now, what happens to emotions as time goes on? We know for a fact that they change, to varying degrees. A honking ...

Standing on a streetcorner, my eyes to the waxing and waning orange-yellow glow of the streetlamp. I see the soft pink of the paint off a nearby doorway, the feathery rustling of leaves, the vibrant reds and yellow reflecting off the wet pavement, casting the entire street under an evocative luminescence. And what can we do but drift through life in hopes of these incandescent moments catching our eyes, taking us if only for a moment to a world so familiar yet so unknown. Unbeknownst to our timidly limited perspectives, these beautiful fleeting moments of elegance and grace are as ever present as the tingling of atmosphere on our skin; as the murmurous thumps of our own heart. What if this was universal? What if, under all the meaningless suffering of people there is a truth that is good and beautiful? And yet, if this was true - let us assume for a moment that it was - then there may indeed exist a way to mine our confusing psyches for this attitude. Then this truth should underlie al...