thoughts...

i take a break from introducing some of my concepts and will write about some of my thoughts these days.

i recently received news about a family friends death. he wasnt an in particularly old person or anything, but he did enjoy, to great extent, consuming food and alcohol. he was a happy man, well at least what i knew of him anyway. and i have yet to find out the reason for his passing, which i will hopefully get later on today.

this brush of death from someone within a 2 degree of separation from me is the second one this year that ive experienced. it puts into perspective the fragility of nature and life. mainly, how when its your time to go, its your time to go. the things we worry ourselves sick about tend to never really materialize, like getting shot, (unless you live in a rough neighborhood with bullet casings on the streets, or anywhere in the states basically.) getting into an airplane accident, or getting some life altering disease. its the things that get you unexpectedly that do the most damage, like a heart attack, or a cerebral vascular accident.

this brings me to another thought. have we become desensitized to death? i mean things happen all the time around us, and we hear things on the news but it seems that only the disturbing cases affect us emotionally. when you hear about gang shootings, you think, damn they should really do something about those guns, as opposed to, damn, those kids had their life ahead of them.

or is it the fact that our society today has implanted a certain routine lifestyle, which takes away our sensitivity to these things? when things dont hit close to home, people dont really give a shit. but when things finally do, youre put in a weird limbo because youre caught between the numbness of routine life and the realness of the exact same thing.

another thing, once you are hit with a shock at how reality is, how fragile life is, and attempt to put things in perspective, namely things that are really important as opposed to things that are trivially important. once you have that perspective, and you feel like you see things clearer. it takes the daily routine not but a few days to knock that clear perspective back on its ass. of course until another dose of reality hits you again then you go through the whole process of shock => perspective => reorder priorities => try to focus on really important stuff => daily routine => back to normal numbness.

as much as i would like to say im different, i am not. i am a victim to this routine numbing and have yet to discover a way to get past it. and my uncanny ability to roll with them punches doesnt help either. now its just a countdown to numbness again and another countdown to the next dose of reality to hit.