definitive feeling

You know, in the end of Harry Potter? Harry was like, “Yo Voldy, it must suck to live without love.”

Yeah, Harry was an asshole. Don’t be like Harry Potter.

At the end of the day, feeling loved is an internal reaction to an external experence. This poses two different instances when individuals could not feel loved. Either their environment does not give them love, or they lack something internally to process that love.

Either way, the feeling of love is such an individual experience, and it is so quickly that individuals can feel in and out of love. There are some things about the external world that drastically realign the experience of the inner world, regardless of its logical proportionality. The mechanisms that connect the internal and external worlds are not tangible like that.

It started so long ago with Descartes’ hypothesis that the pineal gland separated the noumenal and phenomenological self. In retrospect, it’s a pretty stupid idea. But Descartes was really onto something: namely, that it is impossible to understand the relationship between the internal and external world without some defined mechanism.

To be honest, I haven’t looked into this subject since studying Descartes. I’m sure that someone has thought more about it since him. Why is it, that seemingly insignificant parts of the external world are able to affect our internal worlds so significantly? I bet someone came up with an answer already.

So much of my life, I have realized, is learning to identify how my external world affects my intenal world. Specifically, why certain things that happen have a way of inflicting more damange they seem to, theoretically. It’s the difference between observing a certain phenomena in theory versus observing it in practice. There exists an infinity of space in between.

I observe this phenomona when I look at Instagram photos. Sometimes, I am hit with the force of nostalgia.

I find nostalgia to be the enemy of gratitude. Sometimes, I would feel very grateful to have the opportunities that I have right now, and other times I would long for another universe where things could have gone more my way. This was not the world I imagined, but somehow I am living in this particular timeline, and that is the extent to which I could practice stoicism.

Most of the time, I try to forget the other timelines that I can inhabit. Most of the time, I forget. But, sometimes, there is always something about the world that reminds me. This time, since I am responding in response to something I saw, of course, it was just a post on Instagram that included someone I used to be close with.

The mechanism of proportional effect isn’t so much the viewing, but the connection of the experience to other aspects of life. The view is innocuous, but the connotations attach itself to other insecurities about unfulfilled features of the past. And, for me, being able to recognize that is coming one step closer to understanding the mechanics between the inner and outer worlds.