Journal transcript: Boundaries of Experience

Since I began my nomadic life in February, I've had a notebook and pen with me at all times.  I've already filled a few notebooks.  They contain not so much a diary as random piles of ideas, notes, observations, and others' suggestions of what I should read, what I should eat, what I should do.  Few of these ideas are fully-formed; even fewer are well-written.  But, for reasons I don't understand, I feel the time has come to transcribe some of these thoughts into this blog.  Here then is my first journal transcript.

29 March 2010

It is in our nature to confine our lives into a sort of trough, a path of least experiential resistance. Two major influences at once concentrate and amplify this tendency: the City, and Electric Media. Both rely heavily on the repetitive and the combinatorial to achieve their efficiencies and provide their benefits.

While they owe their fundamental logic to their conceptual ancestor -- mass production -- they alter consciousness in a way the ancestor never could. Prolonged exposure to this combinatorially-defined and reduced spectrum of experience will lead inevitably to a sort of observational atrophy, and thus eventually to a literal inability to experience, see or feel anything that lies outside of the prescribed spectrum. We are unwittingly yet voluntarily handicapping ourselves. By dwelling in limiting environments, we are limiting the range of environments in which we can function. We are engaged in a protracted and escalating cold war against change.

It seems to me that, in order to overcome this confining influence, one must meet it with an equal and opposite force, namely, a willful embrace of the entire range of possible human experience. One must aspire asymptotically to dual infinities in this regard: first, the infinity of range (extremes); second, the infinity of the interstitial (subtleties).

Evaluation of experiences must be value-free, subject only to the limits of the senses and of human endurance. One cannot favor joy over pain; sky-diving over quiet conversation; intense over barely-observable; and vice-versa for all the foregoing. An honest and unbiased search for the plenitude of human experience seeks balance, but not harmony. That would be a different endeavor altogether.