Love

All right, so the title isn't exactly creative, but to be completely, I'm not quite sure what I want to talk about here. I have a vague feeling in the corner of my mind, but I can't put a finger on it yet. I also realize, however, that I may yet discover my conversation topic just by starting to write. Here's hoping.

I wonder some days if I'll ever fall in love. Love can be a scary thing. Attempting relationships can either come naturally to some, or if your me, it's a challenge of the greatest degree. Self-introspection has often lead me to the realization that I'm socially awkward and shy. This complicates my feeble attempts at relationships of any kind with anyone, but even more so with the women who catch my attention.

The bulk of my sophomore year and summer were spent working through a kind of depression. I have only come out of it of late, and I fight almost every day to keep my hard-earned happiness and positive disposition. Time alone last year listening to my own thoughts was the equivalent of me cutting myself. I attacked my self-esteem multiple times a day meeting with the kind of vicious success people rarely want. I have many talents, but my ability to cut myself down, to inflict the mental self-injury I did, is not one I'm proud of. Granted, it's a sign of the fact that I'm smart enough to destroy myself, but that takes little intelligence. I'm more proud of the battle I had in pulling myself back to happiness.

This summer brought out a lot of good in me. I learned to feel more comfortable in my own skin. Part of this stemmed from the fact that I truly earned the respect of some of my co-workers. It also grew from me learning to trust my intuition. This summer taught me that I'm smarter than I think and that my intuitive feelings usually lead me in the right direction. I've spent most of my life ignoring my feelings in order to obey logic, only to find myself scared of risk in the process. Instead, when I followed my instincts this summer I met mostly with success, whereas the situations I over-thought usually met with less success.

Today I try hard to follow my intuitive feelings. It's rough. Logic comes easily to me, and my ability to usually think through situations is actually pretty good. But that doesn't beat what my mind knows before I do. It's scary though. With greater ambition comes a greater chance for failure. Life can end at the apex of achievement or in the bottomless pit of despair. Goals can be set, but there is no guarantee on their success. Ultimately, I don't quite know what my realistic goals are. But lately, I've been setting one ambitious goal, one I don't know if I can make. But it's a good goal.

I don't need money, I don't need to succeed as a writer, I don't need career success. If I find love, the kind you earn and make yourself worthy of in life, then my greatest goal will have been met. When you can love one person more than you love yourself, you've made the greatest risk you can in life. In giving that kind of love, you give up so much power over yourself. When one person holds more value to you than yourself, then they have almost complete power over your happiness. You make them a god over your being, and lay at their mercy. Love shows itself when even when they hurt you, you don't destroy their happiness just as they did yours, even though it would be easy and would satisfy that dark corner of every person.

When you give truly and absolutely of yourself, and find the love reciprocated, there can be no greater feeling. Even when the perceived love is only illusory, the happiness is real. I've dealt with the illusion, now I want to find the real thing. Love is both a hard and easy thing to find. Marriage is not all that hard to find, but love and marriage don't necessarily coexist. Even true love may not work through a marriage, as marriage is both a union made of love and purpose. Without both, the marriage can never be truly successful.

I look around me some days. I'm awkward, I don't always fit in easily. Sometimes I feel like I'm a stone skipping across the pool of human experience. With regards to my age group, I feel like I will never fit in much of the time. Despite all of that, I know that I would find an untouchable happiness in a shared love with another human being. In their presence I would find solace, but more importantly, a quiet and impervious joy safe from whatever sadness or destruction that might attempt to shatter it.

And through that love, I would have children. Those children would be the second progression in my love, because in my children I would find unconditional love that I would give anything to protect. My soulmate and I could grow together in raising those children, and hopefully, our love would grow too. There would be challenges, ups and downs, but if the love is worth having, we would conquer those hills and valleys. At the end of our lives, we would close our eyes content with the fruits of our labor, because ultimately, we would have done it all for and through our love, through which all things were made possible and valuable.

Really, I'm having trouble expressing my feelings here. Normally, this would be a bad thing as a writer, but not all things are meant to be expressed through words. Some things are found through the looks and emotions you send people through the nonverbal signals that bounce back and forth from person to person, carrying more meaning than words can ever hope to. The responsiveness of the eyes, the smile or frown of the mouth, the posture of the body, the tone of the voice, the total sum of a person that infiltrates your mind and blasts it with so much meaning that you understand a person in more ways than you ever could normally.

A whole range of emotions can be conveyed. I walk around some days. When I'm not thinking about my books or about whatever vague task I have at hand, I'm lost in thought, dreaming of that hopeful and wonderful day when I'll find even a fraction of love. I then marvel at how I can earn it, how I can be made worthy of some woman's love. I look at other people in relationships, and wonder how they made themselves worthy, and wonder at where I failed in that shared respect. Maybe it's the logic and thought process I apply to way too many things. Maybe I need to stop thinking so damn hard and follow my gut instincts. It may hurt a lot, but it probably should in many respects.

When that one day does come when I find love and know that I have it in return, my life will have full meaning. I will never feel lonely, no matter how far away or isolated I may be. And no matter how dark the nights get or how cold the winters become, there will always be that radiant ray of joy, shining forth from my beloved, burning away all the fears and insecurities that surround me. I don't know when I'll find love, or if I even ever will. I hope so though. I'd give up all my other dreams just to find that special kind of love that makes all other things in life secondary, the kind of love where you and your lover become two stars orbiting each other, drifting through the cosmos without a care.

At the end of the day, we'd fade together into the darkness, as our own children grow to prominence. And as we turn to dust, we'd find immortality in our love, in the legacy of our joint accomplishments, in the godliness of our love-borne children. Though the darkness would invade our minds, ultimately closing down our starry consciousness once and for all, a gravitational bond would keep our decaying souls together, ultimately trailing through eternity as a radiant beam that would be perceived by the few star-struck lovers looking the same way. If there was ever a dream worth having, a goal worth pursuing, a thing worth fighting for, it's that kind of love.

I had no idea where this article would go, but I'm somewhat pleased with the result. I know ultimately where I want my road in life to go, and I just hope that I'll be smart enough to take that path when the opportunity arises. I could definitely miss my chance or chances in life, and I pray that I never do that. All that said, I draw this long-winded article to a close, and with the morning well begun, I ready for bed, dreaming of that life-defining day when I may find love...

The Future

I'm not normally one who worries about dieing. I'm don't want to die anytime soon, but I'm not afraid to die. I have a few small things I want to get done before I die, but I won't begrudge the day when it comes. It's a cycle and a process, and I'm not going to fret over it.

However, some days, I want to keep living. Maybe not in this flesh-based form, but my conscious, my pattern, could continue. Bar any great misfortune or accident, humanity seems to be on the verge of a paradigm shift. In the next 500 years, things should begin to change rapidly. Hopefully, carried by our brilliance and driven by our ambition, we'll branch out of our solar system and into the rest of the universe. Everything will change. On top of that, innovations in technology may lead to startling changes in the way the human mind works. Nanocircuitry may replace the neural wiring of our brains, creating a replacement brain that is faster, networked, and virtually immortal.

Human culture as we would know it would cease to exist in the face of brand new developments. When we one day merge our bodies with machines to the point where is neither is truly distinguishable, one benchmark in the evolution of humanity will have been reached. When the majority of human beings no longer worry about age, but instead exist indefinitely in computer nets and programs, a new benchmark will have been reached. When the first people of thought are born, people who have no flesh counterpart, humanity's physical transcendence will be done. Once me move past bodies, everything will change. Millennia of human evolution will be only a mental memory, with no organic counterpart to call out their heritage through DNA. It will be a fascinating time, though for the people born and raised in that time, it will be completely normal.

Currently, we stand near the brink of at least a few major changes. Many people in the field of technology believe that the next 80 years will bear witness to the beginnings of the merger between human body and computer technology. Downloading your brain into a computer network may be possible by the end of the century. It also may not. Ultimately, there may be hindrances to that merger, hindrances that could hold the process back by any stretch of time. There's a pretty good chance that I might just barely miss the death of natural human death, and while I don't begrudge death, the limitless possibilities that would open up for me when I'm no longer physically bound to my future withering body are limitless.

If I live to be 80 or even 100, I might live long enough to keep on living. Maybe I'll even be fortunate enough to download my neural pattern to a computer network, thus creating my own personal paradigm shifts. Without normal senses, the whole of my consciousness would change. Words, ideas, information would become the root of my conscious thought, and the only physical senses available to me would be those that are mechanically obtained. My body gone, I would no longer occupy a true physical presence, and would instead exist between networks, borrowing a little power from computers across humanity's presence. Then my mind would blossom in new and unprecedented ways.

Time would take on new meaning as my computer based mind could move at far greater speeds. Millions of years could pass for me in only a few normal years. It would be odd to the say the least. Though I would pass normal conscious human thought by billions of years in the average lifetime, there would always be something new. Moreover, all people would be made that way, and with the memory of an old world comes an even greater fascination with the new one. When human consciousness is redone, I hope I can be there to witness it. I have a few curiosities I want to attend to, and there a few challenges I look forward to dealing with. When 2 to 6 thousand years of human advancement are dropped from our genetic and cultural history only to be replaced by man-made machines, I'll be waiting (provided I'm alive).

I want to work on redefining humanity when that happens. Philosophers rarely have a chance to be useful, but it will be during those crises of identity, those years of human history where everything old is forgotten or not useful and everything new is terrifying and uncertain, that philosophers (or anyone with any intelligence, really) may find a new niche. Complex new problems will come to the forefront, metaphysical and epistemic problems that had previously only concerned academics will concern all of humanity. All things will need redefining and reconfiguring. New cultural elements and forms of expression will need to be created, and I want to be a part of it all.

I know I said it earlier, but if I can live another 80 years, I might keep on living. I turned 20 recently, and if I can make to my personal centennial, I might just be able to shed my body and move on to something else, all while retaining some shred of my consciousness. I'd love that opportunity. I'm not afraid of watching everything I know change. It will be startling, but it will be amazing, and I can't wait.

If I don't manage to live that long, or the paradigmatic technological changes don't happen anytime soon, so be it. I'll die at the end of my life happy, because I will have still lived it to the fullest possible. Or, if chance ends my life long before that, like say tomorrow or 5 years from now, I won't hate fate. Life happens, and I'll get over it. After all, I'll be dead, so it won't matter that much to my no longer thinking mind at that point. Really, if I live a full 40 to 50 years after today, enjoying a wife, children, grandchildren, and some friends, then I will be immensely satisfied and die with no regrets. And as I close my eyes each night, ending another day, I'm made aware of my mortality, of my fleshy effervescence, and though I may not want to die yet, I'm content with the way things are, dreaming of the way they could be.