Fog is an interesting thing. It can be comforting or it can terrifying. Driving in the fog at high speed is a very bad idea, but if you don’t have anywhere to go, it’s nice to have less of the world revealed to you. You can almost feel like you’re wrapped in a protective blanket apart from the world, at least for a few hours until the fog lifts.
Knowing too much can be overwhelmed. Considering every possible permutation and outcome to a decision, can be immobilizing.
The impetuousness of youth is often guided by ignorance and idealism. Idealism can be driven by a lack of data. It’s easy to assume that everyone is the same as you, that they all want the same things as you, and that the path ahead is common for all.
But with age, wisdom, and experience you learn that our paths are not all similar and that destinations, goals and motivations are not all the same. So the abundance of information can in fact lead to inaction due to uncertainty of the best solution. Considering everything in your conclusions will not always lead to the triumph, sometimes it will lead to inaction.
We live in a world of abundant information. Details of every possible consideration. News stories of the bizarre and extreme circulate through all mediums. If you take it all in, you have an abundance of biased data to consider and you find yourself in a position of lack. Instead of gaining the global perspective you hoped for you find yourself overwhelmed with information and lost in a sea of sensation. There is no rudder to guide you in the tsunami of stories, you are simply washed away with the overwhelming current.
We are not meant to take in the whole of human experience and see life through the eyes of the everyone in the world. We are meant to experience our own life.
I’m not advocating denial, though I would sometimes encourage it. I’m not advocating ignorance, though there is a great benefit to it. I’m advocating caution and individuality. Don’t give up on your experience in order to process someone else’s. If you allow the weight of the world experience to bare down on your shoulders you are in fact becoming a victim of someone else’s crime.
And this is why I’m advocating fog. This is why I’m suggesting that you shroud yourself in a protective layer of the unknown. Allow yourself to be enveloped in a substance that prevent you from seeing beyond your own back yard. Enable your world to shrink and stabilize as a single home in the middle of nowhere with no connection to anything but your own life. Enabling yourself to slow down and experience your own world one moment at a time. This is your world, your life, your own experience. Don’t rob yourself of it by trying to take in the lives of everyone else.
Namaste,
Kevin
