Zazen

"To see what's in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

-George Orwell

I was in front of the PC screen, a cold starry night outside, and was trying to think of the one thing that mattered to me most at that very instant. As it often happens, whenever you try to think what you're thinking now, the mind returns a blankness and a silence, which otherwise would have been welcome. But as of now, I wanted answers, I wasn't getting one.

Concentrate, Huzefa, focus.

Nothing.

As such, trying to concentrate and freezing up you skulls muscles is not a legitimate way to actually concentrate. I discovered this way back in my life but for some reason, this old habit has stuck with me. For instance, whenever I want to think, I tense up my head, as if to say that by concentrating on the skull, I'll get a boost in my cognitive and intellectual faculties. I would do this at my exams. Why do people tap their heads when they think? I don't think it helps much. It is a cultural thing that everyone kinda does.

Alright. All I needed to do was to recognize what was truly important.

One of the lines I had read in the book I am that, seized my attention for a brief moment:
"That what you don't know of, you're a slave of. Once you know it, you're the master."

I wanted to be that master. I wanted to know what is going on. Thinkables, within a mind that I call my own. But how could you call your mind your own, if you don't know what's in it? Like how can you make your mind, if you don't have a mind to make it? But who made the mind which made the mind in the first place? OK, who made that mind?

The screen was still blank. It was a black screen with green font. I had altered the settings on my document writer to have those colors, partly because it looked better, partly because a white screen hurts my eyes. The cursor, blinking, was a fit representation of my attention span. On,off,...on, off....

Why was I doing what I was doing? I could have many motives, but chief among them was to bring about clarity where there was non-cognition. I wished to see what was and not what was not. That seems simple on the surface, until you realize that that's not natural at all. The brain, it is not a fact verifying organ. It is a story making organ. It dreams it's dreams the way it wishes to. It makes you want to eat a rasagulla while on an important diet. It makes you fall in love with people who don't love you back. It dreams elaborate dreams at night, some cuddly, some scary. It give us our aspirations, our reasons to breath the next breath. The brain is the organ that makes you the center of your own attention, the rock star in every situation. The brain projects you as the special snowflake you think you are: so unique, so irreplaceable, so special. The brain also makes jokes and machines and software, as mine does. It does everything, but tell the truth.

I imagine that this question, what is important to you, to be the virus that causes the hardware to start bursting amuck. Neural connections breaking and frantically looking for new nodes in this novel scenario.

The brain is not designed to tell the truth. So in hindsight it is not really surprising that when I sit in front of the screen and ask that very brain to tell me what is really important, it stares back at me, like some dumb engineering student at the vivas. At other times, it could have written some of the most complex and ingenious code for my companies clients. But now the black screen stared at me, mocking. The answer to this seemingly simple question, was not manifesting so readily.

I needed to write something:

Am I even revealing something? What part of this did you not know? Do I know this, or am I throwing words at myself?

I read what I had written again. I was bull crap. Select all, delete.

It was as if someone was talking to me from the outside in. I read what I had written.

Behind every ambition lies a wound.

If I were to sum up my thoughts and minus the ambitions, in my reckoning, I'd hardly be left with anything. Now that's something. I opened a fresh new document.

Yeah, so what keeps me breathing are my wounds. Wow. So if something hurts, I want it more since ironically it gives you..... life? A purpose? Something to do? What exactly do my ambitions give me. Well off course, I might argue that sometimes I really do achieve stuff because of what I want. Take for instance my ability to touch type. I remember really wanting to excel my peers in my college days, so I spent week upon week of my time in order to enhance my typing speed. In the end, I was left with relatively good typing speed, at least much better than what I was before, and I reap it's benefits even today.

But is that true? For all I know, it might be true that I did feel the urge to prove myself, but it was also true that I really enjoyed the process of training my hand, the feeling of being progressively better. So what actually made me better in the end of the day? What made it all worth it?

By now, I knew that I had digressed quite a bit. Way off topic. New document.

What do you actually want? Do I want hurt? Or is it something else?

Think! think!.... No... I cannot think.... the thoughts come and go on their own. I can only pressurize my skull, if anything.

Isn't it the most obvious thing? The most important thing to me! And I don't know what it is. I don't know why I live. I think and I think, but no answer seems to pop up that explains it all. I lay there thinking for a while, the dark screen returning my stare. After a while, I go to sleep.