Do you know those days when you wake up, and you know something is off? It is not a good nor a bad feeling, it kind of just is. You live the day like any other day, things just happen, as they do always. But something does not seem to be quite right. Sometimes it is not just yourself it is also the others. You find yourself in weird situations and conversations. Everything and everyone is just a bit crazy.

People try to attribute the weirdness to all kinds of phenomena: Full moons, sudden changes in the weather, hormones, the change of seasons, genes, etc. The list could go on and on. Isn’t it just strange that we always seek to explain this? Maybe we should just accept it. What is normality anyway? It is just a concept that our mind creates to cope with the complexity of the world. It is as simple as that, this world is complex.

Frightening isn’t it? This world is not as simple as our mind makes it up to be. The only connection our mind has to the world are all our senses. And those senses provide vague and sometimes erroneous information. While we might think that the quantity this information is already huge we will probably never be able to comprehend the vast range of information which is actually around us.

Still, by using the partial information our mind creates a model of the world which we might call our reality. It can use this model to be able to interact with the world e.g. produce any kind of action. But by creating this model we find our self in a “static representation of a fluid phenomenon”. It is like describing the movements of the ocean with a picture or a painting. It might be close but it will never match the real thing. All of that is even more frightening isn’t it? What we perceive is not what is there. Only our mind tricks us into believing that everything is as we perceive it.

On the one hand, this seems to be our strength as it enables us to achieve amazing things, on the other hand, this is also our downfall, as it is the source of many bad things as for example prejudices. Can we achieve a state of mind where we stop labeling, classifying, objectifying, even perceiving time and space; a state which enables us to connect to what is truly there? Can we accept the weirdness, can we live it? After all, what is normality anyway? Even though the world is obscure at times, there remain some moments where we understand what it is all about. There are rare shimmers of light, we just have to keep looking for them.

Picture: Me and my lovely italian flatmates living some weird days here in Donosti.