Understanding

I woke up from a dream, one where I was verbose and philosophical. And I had to write this as a continuation of that unconscious contemplation:

It is hard to comprehend the world. Understanding is elusive and defiant. While physical laws seem to form the rule that affects the succession of natural occurrences, the idiosyncratic nature of human interaction shrugs off this kind of rigid structure. What’s worse is the futility of a project that attempts to pin down the actions of individuals in such a way that they can be logically explained. People act without the kind of physical justification or ordered explanation that adheres to a causal chain of events absent of our intervention. Attempting to bring human action into a framework of understanding fails because of the odd nature of what we do: we act without provocation, react contrary to our rational explanation, and interact without a view to any specificity of laws.

Feelings don’t have justification, and they persist in defiance of our rational perspective on things. We find ourselves entrenched in our emotions, a slave to interpretations of the world that govern our actions, despite our wish to act rationally and erase away all the things in our lives that just plain don’t make sense. So what are we to do? Regardless of the apparent dichotomy between how we often feel and how we understand the origins of these feelings, we have great difficulty shrugging off the sense that logic is bullshit. We follow our hearts in defiance of our minds; we hope that what we feel will overcome what we know.

But does this lead to an inevitably problematic course of action? When should we be logical and when should we be emotional? It seems as though we employ each strategy at its convenience to us, not with a view to augmenting our understanding of a situation, but with a view to appeasing our wishes. If we want to be right, to feel strong, to love and hate, to forgive and find contempt, we use whatever means necessary to justify the emotion. We cannot pin this down, and we certainly can’t control it.

And I sit in constant conflict of what I should do and what I want to do. I look at a chain of events logically until it hurts, and then I turn off rationality and soak in the emotion. I have no idea how to negotiate a balance between the two, and so I fail to comprehend the world in the way that I want. But perhaps what I want is exactly the opposite of the information that the world is trying to give.