Something On Ten and Ninety

It became clear to me about a year ago that I'd forgotten how to look at things.

Between work, the drive to and home from the office, eight hours or more a day staring at a monitor, the simplest objects around me had lost definition and volume; so when my eyes happened to pass over them they hardly seemed to bear any resemblance to my ideas about them. 

Not by choice but by habit, I'd been coasting over every detail of my surroundings. 

So when it'd come time for me to stop and look around me and concentrate on the faint line of presence running between me and any nearby object, I found that, not only was it loose, it'd been cut. Entirely.

Anything that wasn't relevant to my fears or desires had been reduced to blank stimuli, falling far beneath even the most basic value of my noticing it. 

Had I been rushing things? Had I gotten into the habit of stylizing my relation to everyone and everything around me according a single general value--the optimization of efficiency? 

I had. And the reason, when I even made the most minimal effort at reflection, seemed obvious. 

Somehow it had gotten drummed not just into my head but down in me at the nerve level that anything that didn't bear immediate fruit, that didn't seem immediately relevant or beneficial to my "life narrative"--my ongoing vision of where I was and the direction in which I was headed--was irrelevant, maybe even a hinderance to the eventual attainment of my own fulfillment. 

Any moment that didn't make me smarter or richer or more alert or alive, then, wasn't just useless. It worked on me like a kind of pollutant. That was the fear. That was what drove me to take certain things for granted. 

You could say it's only a natural consequence of watching so much television and clips on Youtube. Of scanning articles for certain relevant phrases, of never taking the time to read something slowly, more than once, all the way through. 

There's a running thesis for this kind of behavior. And I'm not sure it's as ancient as we would like to think it is. 

Ninety percent of life is filler. The remaining ten percent is the very marrow, the core and the thrill of it; contained therein are all the reasons for living. 

But what if the intensity of that ten percent, the clarity with which it's felt and comes through, depends on how consciously you work through the other ninety? 

Then cruising past the duller, more workaday moments, the stretches of waiting and sleeping, would only manage to cheat you from enjoying the higher moments. 

Stronger, more desperate souls have tried to conquer that ninety percent. Drugs, drink, sex, adrenaline, art, voyeurism, violence simulated and real. Almost always the struggle has rendered them delusional or bitter. 

The fear, it's always there, the very engine running the effort--what if my life will be like so many, one hundred percent? All filler, sucked dry of marrow, for no one's benefit.   The suspicion being: from that fear originates the whole game of ascension and heaven. 

Time and again, you see it in the arc of one long life after another. Its contradictory realism. If that fear is fully lived, then it's well founded. But if it's given nothing to feed on, it weakens. The amount of filler in your life is proportional to the amount of fear you derive from it. 

But then, who has ever steered their way through so much filler so calmly? 

Three cats living in an apartment, it seems obvious, are much stronger than one human living alone.