9/30 - We're Barely Here

[skonen_blades]

As humans, what we do best
is recognize patterns and simplify data.
We skim and summarize.
We extrapolate from incomplete input.
We package the past into highlights.
We see the future as plannable.
We think we see the present clearly.
If we didn’t, we’d go mad.
There are too many fragments here,
too many shards of fact,
and their sum is way less
than the whole of their parts.
We need to fill in the blanks
Not unlike we do with the blind spots right in front of us
where our optic nerve attaches to our eyes.
The looking glass is truly half empty
And the rest is up to us.
It’s why reality is a consensual hallucination.
A mass delusion
that seems to differ from place to place
and even person to person.
Why time is elastic.
Why we can be so sure of something
that we’re dead wrong about.
There are only a few big rocks in the jar.
The rest is marbles and sand added by us
to make it look solid.
Like how atoms are mostly not even there.
We warp our minds with our own
gravitational wells of perception.
All our attempts at explanation
(Art, science, and religion)
Are just great tries by primitives
haunted by intelligence
doing their best
to process, define, and explore
what we can barely make out.



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