I had an amazing thought process today. I don't really know how to describe it yet, but it went something like this.
Would you prefer to
1. Take one step out of your routine path to step on an interesting pebble?
2. Put your entire life on hold to step the the biggest pebble there ever was (e.g. a mountain) far far away from your normal path?
Conventional, old-school survival thinking(?) thinks that they are both the same and both utterly pointless efforts. It doesn't feed you, or anyone else for that matter. However, I think that everyone thinks that there's something undeniably cool about doing #2. At this point, I want to say that I believe in natural selection (and how it preserves the things that are useful for our survival in the human race and allows whatever less useful traits to die out, blah, bli, blah).
Why then do we think that #2 is cool? Why do all of us do? Why did everyone before us? Something in our subconscious feels that #2 is amazing cool. Despite the heavy costs on the person undergoing it and the many responsibilities that he must have forgone. Damn . . . I just just messed up my train of thought.
#2 is cool only in the right situation. A person has to be in a enviable situation in a first place to be able to pull #2 off. And then the person must be cool himself to acutally pull it off. I bet all our subconsious minds picked that up long before our consious minds did. Or maybe it was just obvious to everyone else except to me because I haven't really been using my mind lately.
Yet another pointless discussion in my head. Or is it? Argh, I frustrate myself.
(Half an hour and a shower later)
Then again, the whole discussion was a metaphor for seemingly useless accomplishments. And all of us have our little own envious positions (another long discussion for another time). And all of us can do our own things are crazy hard for ourselves to accomplish, yet mean almost nothing from an outsider's perspective (The coolness of mountain climbing is well documented now, but I bet the very first guy to do it was labelled a psycho by his village waiting for food) . . . I am deviating.
What I'm trying to say is, although as Mr/Father/Uncle Time has shown us again and again the things, that lead to the sweeping statement that anything is possible, sometimes the issue of possibility is not as important as the issue of desire . . . in other words, I know I can, but I do I want it?
Therefore, sometimes I think that we all embark on our own little crazy adventures not to fill our bellies or impregnate the most amount of women, but to remind ourselves why we want to in the first place. Perhaps the view from the mountain shows you how beautiful the world is and makes you want to hug every tree in the world, turning you into a conservationist in an instant, or perhaps it's foggy and the cold up there makes you long for your girlfriend's IndoMee with fried egg, wanting you to make you go home to hug her instead.
Whatever it is, I believe one of our great strength (and seeming weakness) lies in our ability to do crazy stuff, just to inspire us to do another group of crazy stuff, so one so forth, until we do something that everyone just can't deny is absolutely amazing.
I mean, the first microorganism must have been a crazy guy to decide that he wanted to climb the pebble I didn't want to step on. What a hero he must have been if he indeed did climb that pebble. And if you're one of a certain kind of group of people, you might also believe that people came from the very organisms that I might have just discussed.
Anything's possible.
(after a night's sleep)
Sometimes we do things that no one understands, sometimes even we don't understand why we're doing it. Perhaps we were somehow brainwashed into doing it, perhaps some part of us just knows that this is the best/most exciting/safest way of doing things, all things considered.
In the uncertainty of crazy things to do, there are no limits holding us down, no failures of other to disuade us from giving up . . . only the tantalising promise of "what could be?", lingering in front of us.
There is no absolute right or wrong in crazy, simply because there is nothing to compare to. No one can really say for sure of the result, or what others will think of it.
However, not everything can be crazy. Crazy has a purpose and creativity devoid of fear of failure. Crazy has to be well-thought out and planned thoroughly in advance. Crazy is by definition, defying convention. Crazy is cool! Crazy is doing what you think needs to be done, despite what people are telling you. Crazy is smiling quietly to yourself because you think you are right.
Crazy must be so fun to implement.
