What is the maximum amount of time a human can be happy? And how strong may this happiness be, so it can last? How beneficial would it be for the world to make humans capable of sustained happiness? And what would be the cost of that change be on the overall system? Does the system in which we currently live reward something that requires a lot of energy to deliver a tiny benefit? Or does it prefer something that creates a small benefit for a larger group, at a lower energy cost?
Does the system perhaps seek neither? Is there a need for balance and for an equilibrium in which there are not necessarily winners or losers at all?
Perhaps all win or all lose? Perhaps we are just destined to fall with grace?
If we look at a drop of water, or at the Earth and the Moon, or maybe at the entire solar system, it appears that all of them somehow want to get somewhere in a fairly lazy way. Or perhaps they just get to where they want to be because they need to be there and find the best equilibrium there? That’s why there are clouds. That’s why the moon always faces us in a certain way. That’s why eventually everything will collapse into a still distant black hole.
I do enjoy the tedious tasks of putting small amounts of colored liquid or paste onto various surfaces. I enjoy taking moist dirt and shaping it with my hands, so it can then hold water, which in turn allows me to prepare something with that water. Like tea.
I do enjoy diving into the ocean of language, equipped with my tiny, shabby boat of linguistic experience to create texts like this one.
Looking at the work I did in the 90s, I seem to be okay at creating fragments of things. Shards. May they be texts or images or anything really. As if I were creating little bone splinters and burying them for future generations to discover and to be puzzled by.
What will be the items I will be allowed to leave on this planet, connected or attributed to me?
Will those items bring some kind of vague shadow of happiness to those who will eventually unearth them? I would love for that to be the case. In fact, thinking about this gives me a mild reflection of a happy moment.
Typical badly evolved brain problem.
Why would I hope to give someone a moment of happiness long after I am gone, when now is the time and the opportunity to provide sparks of happiness to others?
We do live in a time where those who kill and pillage and destroy are often celebrated for the tiny moments when their team runs their philanthropic strategy for whatever reason it might be. If they happen to win.
So while I secretly wish for a system in which we all just orbit each other and then produce little shards that eventually fit into a much larger and much more spectacular picture… the reality is far more complex.
I do enjoy making though. Making is a nice experience and it is a good way to put messages in bottles and then to just let them go, one after the other after the other.
I wish those before me had done that more, really. Or would that somehow hold me back now? Is nostalgia debilitating or does it inspire?
I am writing this in what must have been a stable of some sort many decades ago. Birds are singing spectacular songs outside. Insects are still alive here in Umbria.
It is sunny, but I am so glad to be in the calm shade of this little room.
The hill out there has looked this way for thousands of years, i guess. Well, similar at least.
Has it changed because it is no longer a collis? Now it is a collina?
There is a spark inside that feels quite content. Despite of all the pain and suffering and unnecessary debris from whatever happened before me. There is a moment of calm in me. A moment that appears as if it were floating in calm silence, gravity pulling me towards the place where it all makes sense.
Then there is a fly.