don’t think too much about it

you’re a complex, chaotic arrangement of cells and chemicals, neurons and receptors interacting in a billion ways every second; you can’t possibly expect to control it as you’d like — you can only push yourself in a direction and hope it’s the right one.

but how much of a choice is really yours? how much of it is your body and brain moving without conscious input, and you rationalizing it later as your own decision? when you second guess yourself, that odd feeling of uncertainty in your gut — that’s the moment you step closer to the unsettling idea that you don’t command your mind as well as you’d like to think.

you pretend that you’re in control of it all, but a few damaged neurons in the amygdala, an error in some serotonin receptors, and you could lose yourself — or whatever you think of as “yourself”. your mind is not a perfect bastion of rational or emotional thought; it is a physical object, a lump of grey matter suspended in fluid, subject to the confounding laws of chemistry and biology.

for someone who likes to think they have control — over thoughts, actions, life — it’s not a very pleasant idea. but beyond that, as it casts doubt on conscious control, it questions personal responsibility. the balance of hormones and variable substances coursing through one body is different from another; what if they’re to blame?

and if we’re all just chemicals, it’s terribly cruel —

all of us equal, but we run on different rules.

some their love just begun, they flow and stream and rise like the sun;

others lost by design, wandering, drinking motion like wine.

but some have heavier veins, filled with compounds dark and cold;

their hearts burn like acid and explode.

you are chance, not coherence.

a stream of atoms and reactions holding back entropy just long enough to think, long enough to breathe. held together by the belief that, against the steadily growing odds, you are more than you know.

don’t think too much about it. it works better that way.