Letting Go A Little Bit November 16, 2009 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

I’m starting to realize that the key to personal happiness is learning to let go a little bit.  In earlier parts of my life I tended to be a control freak.  Perhaps that’s why I went into computers, because there was a logic to them, there is no maybe in a computer, only yes or no, on or off.  And by stacking an inordinate amount of these binary routines together, I could construct a predictable life.  But what I didn’t realize then was that as I created more routines to manage the things I previously did by hand, this only required more complex routines to manage them.  It’s a bit like the Godel incompleteness theorem, if you are familiar with that.  Fallacious statements require new statements to “bring them into the fold” so to speak, to contain them, but then a new statement is needed to then bring that newer statement into the fold.  This continues ad infinitum.  There is no end to the logic, except perhaps by ending logic.

So I try now and let go of things a bit, like at work, where I see other hands messing with things I did.  I point and suggest, but I don’t bite my nails and toss and turn nightly worrying about how some schmuck will mess up my finely crafted house of cards.  It’s all ultimately a chaotic system anyway.  We have no real control over what goes on “out there” and we are only capable of controlling our reactions to the world.  I don’t know if that makes any sense whatsoever, but it does to me.

I went to the botanical gardens of Brooklyn yesterday.  It’s easy to put my beliefs in practice there.  Around plants, you can’t have an ego, you can’t assert your correctness or your individuality around a thing that has no sense of self.  It’s easy to let go around plants because that’s what they pretty much do.  They cannot act or cogitate or fuss over how much people like them.  They simply grow, and are content with that.  Of course, we are entirely different forms of being, but I take a lot of solace when I’m around plants.  It seems they have a secret which they are eager to share.  Here are some pics.