I feel, therefore I live. I am an extension, a version if you like, an individual embodiment of Life itself…
‘I think, therefore I am’ is Rene Descartes’ famous quote which has inspired many, including Alexander Belyaev in the 1920s…
Well, for me, to feel is just another way to think. I experience and touch things through feeling them and not simply read about them, contemplate them, or paraphrase them. I want to see things with my own eyes, not so much read them in books and I want to touch, taste, and so on.
From books I get some ideas, I feel inspired or I just like a good twist to a scenario… But I don’t see the world through books, for that, I have experience and feel with my own soul, mind, body… And I’m talking about doing extreme activities or living an adventurous life… It only means to let your imagination expand and have the courage to live out something to its fullest potential. Kind of like seeing something to the end, not stop half-way through, because you don’t know what’s going to happen…
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
-Oscar Wilde
In my world, Emotion is the fuel of existence. It also lights the ignition spark in everything I do. Time proves all that happens within and from life but not Life itself. Like the famous saying goes “Infinity is a Zero with a twist”… What if it untwists? How will time prove it, when it can’t divide it?
If existence is a sum of experiences, each of which constructs of feelings, associations, different meaning, and time has validated it, and all that is within you in every moment, then what it has to only get purer and purer, and simpler and simpler as the memory refines it. But for some reason, it doesn’t… There’s always another twist, and another twist, and another twist…
What if we become oversensitive to the point of burning? Maybe then we’ll be almost at the point of actually living outside of the constantly switching predicaments…
I recently discovered for myself that the scenarios in my existence only get clothed and masked in different décor, the roles assigned are slightly rearranged as to get me to a point of forgetting the furthest layer and make me not realize, I’m in the same stage play.
I had an interesting experience this summer. It started with a random event: my mother dropping a napkin in a restaurant… As she was dropping the napkin, two elderly women were talking about Cairo and the Egyptian exposition in the city center this summer and my mother was reaching for the napkin on the floor and was telling them something about the exposition. At that very moment – then and there the restaurant changed physically for me: the era, the women, my mother… Everybody looked different. My mother turned into a woman with an old-fashioned ivory dress, a big hat, and a white umbrella…
I discovered that my imagination sent us to the 1920s and as she picked up the napkin, I suddenly recognized my mother in the woman, who was my older cousin in that retro scenario… And all the memories of that era and my existence in it, including the almost identical type of close connection I have with her, poured within me… In my mind, I lived through the whole thing, with the memories intact and then my feelings and my consciousness just jumped right back in the present moment as if nothing happened.
The downside of it all, intense experiences like this also makes a mess out of what should be a bliss… I’ve realized long ago that experiences are never perfect, they are never completely satisfying, and they are often confusing because of the feelings, intensity of emotion and so forth, that they were made up of. Satisfaction always slips through the present.
The chain of experience creates conflict and friction while unfolding through events… In my case, my events are in patterns and loops that I discover or recognize on my path. The only tragedy in life to me is as T.S. Eliot says is “to have the experience and miss the meaning”. That’s the reason patterns and loops occur, so that one day, we get the meaning and complete the experience…
Ami Tola