Only a Mark

It's the small things that hit home.  That get under the skin, give you the creeps.  The little connections that you never see until you're not looking for them.

It's late, and I'm reading a book.  House of Leaves.  An excellent read, non-standard by all definitions.  Never read a book like it.  Probably never will again, unless it ends up changing the way people write, and read, the way I hope it does, but know it never will.

VIII, the heading to the page, the beginning of a new section.  No title, though Webster's definition of SOS does lend a vague insight to the following pages.  Pages which cover a lot of ground.  That distance isn't important though.  Not tonight.  Not right now.  How do we know that even Johnny and his footnotes lend insight to something we can't see. 

There's more.  Something I notice early on, but don't comprehend until the end of the chapter, nudged slowly to understanding by the torrent of words and images, all of which gathers together, puddling at the edges of my mind.  Everything means something.  There is no accident, no whim.  Not here, not in this world, this realm, which as I read, I find cannot be confined to a page.  No, refuses to be.  Opening eyes to something which was always there, but which I did not see.  Like the house, ever growing, changing.

I returned to the beginning, placing a flag, a reminder of things I can't, or won't, discover now.  Cut short in my idle wondering, doubting of my future fidelity to my desire.  Cut short by a simple check-mark, nothing too large or too small, nothing of consequence, a simple check-mark made purposely as it was, not to be noticed.  I can only exist, a remembrance somehow of the reason I once feared the dark.  That which seemed so infinite, so intimidating, and most importantly, so unknown.

All stops as I see it, many precious seconds are lost, minutes for all I know.  My lungs remind me with a searing pain that I must breath. This because of simple mark, though more.  The reassurance of a scarred, embittered, and lonely boy to his mother.  Reassurance that he had received her letter.  The question laps 'round my thoughts though, was the mark meant for her? or for me?  If for me, did it know I would find it?  Not in a search, but by accident, out of the periphery of my sight.

The mark frightens me.  Like all unknown.  Simply because it's a way for the book, taking cues from the house, to assert that it cannot be limited, and that all beyond is unknown.

Against reason, I'm jumping at shadows.  Shadows of what will be found as I delve deeper into this ever shifting realm.


SOS

The Dual Nature of Belief

I was thinking about something or other today, I can't really remember what it was, but I ended on a strand of thought I've gone over a few times. That strand is belief. Belief is an awesome thing, it's an enabling kind of thought process. If you believe that something is so, then in your mind it becomes so. It helps you to accomplish things you may never have tried otherwise. We as humans believe in a ton of things, we can believe in ourselves, in others, in honesty, in virtues, in a purpose, all of these things helping us to better ourselves in some way or another. It's not a matter of weather something we believe is true or right, the belief can benefit us.

That's not my entire strand of thought of course, the above is pretty well accepted by just about everybody who's ever practiced it, which is most of the world's population I imagine. No, the completion of the strand was this, that belief can also work against us, though I'm not sure if people ever really think about it, perhaps if they did, they would work around it. Some examples, people can believe they can't use computers, they can believe they can't play a sport, they can believe that it's better to chew their gum with the paper wrapper still on... anyway, the point is that in the end, a lot of these things can be counter productive. A lot of the time though, I don't think that we catch them when we say it.

When we believe something negative, it more often than not comes out something like, I can't use a computer, I can't play this sport, etc. The definitive cannot, takes the place of the simple fact that we don't think we can. We can believe so many different things, we can enable ourselves in so many different areas of our life through simple belief. Why not in these areas? What keeps us back from achieving everything? From doing anything? My thought is that people simply hold themselves back through firm disbelief in their own ability, it becomes rooted, and we begin to believe that rather than being just a thought on our part, it's a fact.

There are those who look past this, who ignore what they've been told, perhaps even what others have told them, and believe that anything is possible. People can believe that if they put their mind to it, that if they try, even if it takes time, that they can do it. These are the great people, and I personally believe that we all have it in us to become great people. We can all become people who dare to do, who dare to learn, who dare to break through the impossible, be it our own disbelief, which becomes a solid I can't to us, or to breaking through scientifically, medically, or mechanically, to find something that everybody looked past.

We can be whatever we want to be, so long as we don't let anybody else, or more importantly, ourselves, hold us back from our own infinite potential.