The tao of Steve...

Button is off to the St. Louis Vegetarian Society meeting tonight, so I took the bus to school early today. When I stepped off the bus, I was rained on. It was a soft sprinkle with large drops of rain. I've been reading a lot this semester, mostly (actually, only) in philosophy. I've actually been enjoying it a lot, and I think I've found my mind opening up a bit. Perhaps not like in the existence of the mind or whatnot, but on life. Which brings me back to the bus ride here, and Button's trip to eat vegi/vegan foods and our life in general right now.

We're broke, and we've been having problems. Mostly they both are related to buttons problem finding a job, and her disillusionment with graduate school. I'm having the time of my life anymore. I'm really enjoying school overall, and work is turning out to be pretty good. The only problem I've had was my little buddy car is having neurological problems and is being looked at.

But I think the problem we're having is this: I've found not quite enlightenment, but some sense of peace in the world, and with myself. Outside of the problems with my mom, I find myself feeling better, and much happier than I have in a long time. But Button hasn't. And I don't know how to share how I feel, and how to get her in the same moment as I am.

And I wonder if part of how I feel is from the stuff I've been reading. I chose existentialism because I thought it would be interesting, but I never thought it would be so life enhancing. Existence is what you make of it, and I find that thought alone to be amazing and life changing. We are what we chose to be, our lives are as they chose to be.

Two people can experience the same event but have two totally different moments, two experiences, totally different from the other, because how they chose to experience the moment. I find myself trying to incorporate this kind of thinking into my life, my mind. My world is this moment, and I shape it by how I experience it.

Apart from that, reading The Search for Schrödinger's Cat also influenced this thinking. Science tells us that we can't know anything about what we wish to study without experimenting on it, and then we can only learn what we experiment for, and only what we experiment for at the moment we experiment for it. Lost? We can only know about something when we study it at the moment we study it. We influnce it with our exam of the object, and it influences us as well.

Life, and our experiences during it, is influenced by our experiencing if, and we are influenced by it as well. We chose how we live our life, and how to experience the moments within it based in no small part on how we have chosen to experience previous events, and how those events have effected our own choices. We are victims to no one but ourselves. We are masters of ourselves, and our world.

And that is the single most awesome thought ever.

And what does this have to do with Button going to STL and me getting rained on? The sky was cloudy, but there was only one rain cloud in the sky, right over head, raining on me. It was a really cool experience, to see the actual cloud that was raining on you. In a sense, you are being touched by the cloud, it is reaching down and experiencing the world, and you. Sometimes existentialism is cool.

And no, I cant use any of this for class.