Aquarium

I love it to go out on the balcony by night or look out of the window, to watch the lights in other buildings go on and off, to watch people living their private-evening-selves.

I wrote about life journeys and life stories in the last days, about using words and images to reflect. With all this, it’s easy for the ominous Self or Ego to become bigger and bigger, until all that remains of the rest of the world has crumbled to a formless something in the corner of our minds. In these moments, looking out reveals how ridiculous this it. When there is more information and life in the few images of one of the many high rises, in the few branches of a tree or the feathers of a bird than in all the what-ifs we came up with.

I often find it utterly fascinating how low the “resolution” of our dreams is. “I want to be a doctor” he says and thinks of little than his title and a bit of money. “I want to be an astronaut” she says and thinks of little but a shiny circle in the sky and maybe iron being thrust into the atmosphere and a memory of the shaking of a merry-go-round. Yet do they really think of how minutes flow into hours into days into weeks into months into years of doing what doctors and astronauts do?

All this becomes even more true with the internet, where after scrolling for an hour or two we struggle to remember a handful of images or stories, where reading news articles leaves us with little more than that others too don’t like politician A or business person B. How humbling it is then to watch out of the window and see how many many people (or birds and trees) there are just a few-minute-walk away from us, people of whose lives we know so little. Lives taking place in what looks like just an aquarium from our balcony.

What is the resolution of your dreams?