pixtrix

Have you ever sat down and from a distance, watched a homeless person asking for money? It’s one of the most interesting sights you can find in our culture…, most people walking by the bum will lock their face towards the ground or horizon trying to avoid eye contact at all cost with the hobo and ignore them completely, the speed of their steps will increase, some even go to the length of pulling out their mobile and pretend having a conversation…the ones who give money will quickly throw in a coin and walk away without much thought, nobody sat down with the homeless woman (in my case), took her hand into their own and asked her story of how she ended up there or tried to get get to know her more.

Why? It’s too much…, we have enough problems of our own to have to solve and worry about other strangers, because there is just too many horrible injustices in the world happening and we can’t cope with having to be aware of all of them, we feel helpless and overwhelmed, so it’s easier to switch off…to avoid those things, to only think of our own and become ignorant to everything else, because ignorance is bliss right? Well so is insensitivity…

That’s the conclusion I came to in High School thinking it would be much easier that way, I realized we lived in an intellectual age where knowledge meant power, the more information I knew and used to analyze everything the better…because I’d be one step ahead of everyone else and felt in control knowing what would happen next, instead of expecting the unexpected.The problem with that theory was a small little variable I forgot to use in my equation…life, a few years ago I learned, you can usually control the Where’s, the Why’s and the How’s but you can never control the Who’s and the When’s, you can control the idea of planning a rabbit trap someWhere, for some Why reason and to occur in a certain someHow way, but unless that someWho rabbits happens to be hopping into it in the exact someWhen moment…the trap won’t work.

To control is to be insensitive, the more sensitive a person is, the higher the chances of developing insecurities of being wounded leading to the creation of a manipulative, controlling or deceitful personality.One thing you’ll notice is many people portray themselves as being what they’re not, what they’d like to be, we pretend to be what we are most insecure about, you can usually tell when someone is naturally something or pretending to be, overly confident individuals are sometimes the most afraid of us all, highly intellectual people can try to appear that way from insecurities of being considered dumb, funny people and many of your favorite comedians appear to be happy and have a keener sense of humor from bad childhood experiences or suffering from a fear of rejection (we all know some fat or gay person…) therefore using humor as a way of gaining the affection and consequent approval of others.There was this guy named Emilio who I was friends with, when I was at his house and his mum was having guests over, she’d send us over to the neighbors to carry their leather couch over to his house, then go pick up some silk curtains from his grandmothers and to bring down the good silverware from the attic all while she worked like an ant moving things around the house, but when I hung out with Samuel who was from a wealthier family, when his mums guests came over we never touched a thing because she was naturally rich, yet she did instruct him to speak politely…Emilio’s mum pretended to be rich because she felt most insecure about her economic condition while Samuel’s felt most insecure about her sons potty mouth that would reflect on her poor parenting.

Being aware of all that is happening around us is too dangerous, it’s way less painful to see things narrowly and focus our vision on ourselves first.It’s like those two ladies I previously wrote about who were bashing about their boyfriends/husbands, I mentioned fear is closely connected to love, it’s because of insensitivity, you’d think people in love would personify sensitivity itself but in some cases it’s actually the opposite…love brings out insensitivity, because no matter how well you think you know the person, you still feel vulnerable when you’re around them (and for the jealously insecure, when your not)…you surrendered your armor, sword and shield to a stranger by showing your love and gave them access to enter your intimate life of inner feelings and hurt you whenever they want, to this point it’s all a beautiful demonstration of sensitivity and trust, but then things start changing usually around the time they get married and have to give up their single personal space to live together…arguments start happening, and it’s not life changing debates either, surely you’ve heard the ridiculous things couples argue about…stuff like who had to take out the trash, why did you leave my phone on the bed?, why do you buy this cheese I don’t like?!…What purpose is behind these trivial confrontations? apart from dumping repressed anger on someone else, what use to be surrendering to another person through love is now becoming a domination instead, a fight for moral superiority to find out who will be the dominating person in the relationship and who will be the submissive one, because who ever gets to dominate will get to control their own life again (like they had before giving up their personal space) as well as control their partners, providing them with total ease of mind, usually being the male who dominates since we have a bigger sense of pride towards showing a sensitive weakness, it explains why many strong minded, smart or feminist women are sadly found unappealing by some men.

Isn’t that what marriage is all about? committing to something to show the other person your relinquish control as an individual and wear the proof of the contract you signed in the shape of a ring on your finger? Because marriage does sound like a business transaction to me, a social institution…I’ll work, protect you and the offspring’s, mow the grass, do handy work around the house and kill a spider every now and then while you work if you have to, take care of the kids, clean up the house and cook.The wishful thinking of marriage providing security inevitably breeds sorrow and fear, seeking security invites insecurity, is there really security in a relationship when each one of us is looking out for our own security? our own path? fulfillment of our own egocentric nature? Because our love seems very conditional; “As long as your mine, do the things I like and love me back…I’ll love you, but if you stop belonging to me, giving me what I want or loving me, I’ll despise your guts!”, we’re looking out for ourselves…to truly love someone or something is to do it selflessly with no personal interest of reciprocation, marital love has hidden interests and therefore is dependable, you depend on the other person emotionally, physically, psychologically to provide security, but if they cheat on you for example, your emotional balance is destroyed…depending on another person with personal interests causes anxiety, fear, jealousy, guilt and so long as you have those feelings you can’t really love someone.A funny thing I noticed about jealousy is, women care more for emotional cheating than physical cheating while with men it’s the total opposite, I believe it has to do with our most primitive wild nature, many women forgive their partners for physically cheating on them but they feel most spiteful when their partner emotionally loves someone else…while men would rarely forgive discovering their partners cheated on them physically but can ignore emotional cheating, that’s because of our basic instinct of reproduction and leaving an offspring, men in the past didn’t have the ability to know if the offspring was really their own or some other mans, while the women always knew the offspring was certainly hers, women however depended on the male’s to stick around, take care of the family and protect them against wild predators (like spiders in the kitchen)…so they needed to make sure the men loved them to hang around…arghhh!, I watch too much Animal Planet.

The person who lives with sensitivity, love and without conflict…shouldn’t be afraid of dying, because to truly love something is the act of dying itself, it’s losing all types of fears, jealousy and opening up your heart giving what you love and feel passionate for, let it be an interest or living thing, the power to destroy you at any time.

Have you noticed how important being able to verbalize is? While writing I’m constantly thinking to myself…should I use a larger variety of words and put my vocabulary to full use? would it convey my message any clearer? or merely come across as a conspicuous authors endeavor to make his pretentious scriptures prominently seasoned.But to me they are almost empty vessels, how can I force the majestic magnitude of the sky and the way it makes me feel when I look at it, into insignificant sized words? Yet as soon as we have learned how to walk and talk and before our personality has formed by the age of 7, we are sent off to schools and universities to improve our verbalization and logical way of thinking.Why you may ask? because being sensitive and feeling is not an admirable quality in our society, we are raised to be thinkers not feelers, feeling is too unpredictable…who knows what you may do or where you’ll end up if you allow your feelings to take over? What if we all decide to go help the poor in third world areas and don’t become productive members of our country to maintain the economic stability? How would our insensitive society be able to control us then once our material and career ambitions were never inflicted upon as and were replaced with hearts that aren’t scared of being more aware?

Insensitivity is applauded, because your doing as your told without any emotion…isn’t discipline made out to be a quality in the army? you can’t be sensitive there, it would be an inconvenience…because sensitivity is rebellious and shows a sharp intelligence, you’d realized what your being forced to do in the name of ‘your country’ and stop being an obedient lapdog.

Feelings mess things up, they make everything more complicated, I learned there’s ways of avoiding them but you can never control them, when in a situation that requires an emotional decision, like the time I had to give up one of my pets, I don’t know about you but I can actually hear my logical insensitive side yelling at my sensitive side, it says something like; “SHUT UP!, stay out of this, let me tackle the whole thing, I learned and know everything, I understand arithmetics! I can deal with it without feeling bad at all like you”.You can know the difference of when your sensitive or logical side are doing the work by sensing your heart beats, if it’s your sensitive side your heart beats will increase, you’ll feel dizzy because you know your vulnerable, either physically (as you stand in front of a hungry Tiger) or emotionally (in love, stomach butterflies and nervousness), sensitivity is being in touch with the unknown, it’s like getting lost in the middle of a forest, theres no maps, rules or instructions to follow, it’s uncharted territory…your insensitive side however is like following a highways straight route.

As a society we don’t need emotional individuality but efficiency, we need to become insensitive machines to work better as obedient, disciplined automaton’s, like Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant satire of Modern Times demonstrates, being emotional individuals is too risky and dangerous, we start inquiring about poverty, inventing ideas to change the world and balance things out, searching for new rules or structures and all that is bound to create disturbances in the already well established productivity methods, at this point I might as well say something like “it’s a conspiracy I tell you! those aliens…” to sound ever crazier.

While I was at the newspaper agency the other day I spontaneously started laughing after reading some of the titles and headlines magazines used, “How To Love More Profoundly” one of them read, its funny how that statement assumes everyone who reads it already knows what ‘love’ actually is and can learn now to do it deeper…they’d make more profit by starting with the basics of asking “What is love?”, but this is another example of our machine like sensitivity, we are using the insensitivity methods we were taught at school to learn things like computers or machines in logical insensitive terms, as if love had some sort of rules manual you could follow to achieve it…like the instructions that come with the crappy IKEA build-it-yourself furniture, we are slowly becoming technical minded computers that process and follow logical rule patterns.I can already imagine the insensitive future, a guy going to court for killing his wife and the judge reading his statement…”Sir, you claim to be a peaceful loving man in the police interview you declared, so why did you kill your wife?” “Well your Honor, I am a peaceful loving man….my wife kept nagging and interrupting my peaceful silence so I stabbed her!”.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, how can we understand the joy of the world if we dont understand the suffering? because if we become insensitive to the bad things in life we also become insensitive to the good ones, we close our eyes and look straight ahead occasionally enjoying the little things that make their way from the peripheral sides to the center of our narrow vision, theres a scientific study that shows children who suffer from Autism develop higher withstands of pain from social isolation, and since they don’t feel pain themselves they don’t understand the concept of it so they can’t have empathy for others pain, working on that basis…if we become insensitive and as consequence, don’t completely feel love or sadness, how can we give love fully to someone or feel the right empathy for their misery?....