“On the fringe.” I wonder if this well describes the way I have felt for most of my life: on the fringe, never really in there, doing. It is partly the burden of the thinker who can never just do, just be, because if one isn’t thinking about something, it tends to elude memory and thus never really seems to have happened. This is the sad, and probably very false, logic of the thinker; doomed to the fringes, never really living life.
I find interesting this idea that if one does something without thinking about it, if one just does it without reflection, that it will not be remembered and thus doesn’t have a point of having happened. What part does memory play in this? Do our memories make us who we are? If we lose our memories, do we lose our identity? What makes us who we are as opposed to what we are?
But it seems to me that there has to be a happy medium here. There has to be a way to live life with awareness and at the same time not let that awareness get in the way of the being.
Maybe the key is to not worry about what is done, which is a form of clinging. I think it is foolhardy to leap before you look. At the same time, too much looking can nullify or severely impair the leap. How to find a balance, or how to find the right way to both look and leap?
To be sure, life is a gamble, and nothing risked, nothing gained. But I think what I am getting at here is that there can be such thing as an educated risk, a thoughtful and wise gamble.
.
From my personal notes, 12/22/99
