Feb 12: Love For Reality

I called out of work and slept for 8 hours.

I spent the first three hours at work in meetings with my coworkers before I changed my status on Slack to sick and closed my laptop. I wonder what they thought. They probably have an intuition it is a mental health concern.

I must adore this reality and all that constitutes it.

I must look inwards and "prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise" (Weil).

The illness that slowly consumes my mind: the intersection of God's derivations, the sciences and math, and human catastrophe. I must find in myself radical acceptance of this premise, to see it as beautiful as a morning sky. Or, at the very least, see it as biological necessity.

This is not to say that I should keel over and die, or submit to this thing that slowly chews my brain neuron by neuron. I should do all in my power to preserve my body.

Strange as it is, my body feels loaned to me. Not of me. It would be disgraceful to trash something that was entrusted to me and not even mine in the first place. My ethics of care is from my own biological alienation.

Whatever it was that wrote the above paragraph will forever not be of this world.

"So be it."

Imaginary paradise: I am stable, I am safe, I am redeemed, I am one person (corollary: I am loved).

Real hell: I am unstable, I am ambiguously safe, I am not redeemed, I am many people (corollary: I am not loved).

Eat, drink, and sleep. One thing at a time…

"So be it."

From my dream of meeting Weil:

We stood next to a table in the corner of the room, and I pulled out the biography about her life written by her best friend.

I handed it to her and told her it was "a book from the future."

What stunned me was that she casually flipped through the pages without too much care about what happened to her in the future or how she died.

Instead, we briefly talked about math and completing the squares. When she talked to me, she really did show total and utter attention in what I said and the world around her.

I really did feel in that moment as if she saw God in the world around her.