This email is not about what it’s about

Hi Reader,

I’m not going to tell you what I’m thinking right now.

Well, that’s awkward. On several levels.

In the first place, why wouldn’t I want to share with you?

More importantly, if I’m not telling you what I’m thinking, what am I doing right now?

There are probably other levels on which “I’m not going to tell you what I’m thinking right now” is a strange thing to say, but let’s focus on this second one.

It’s a paradox, of course. “I’m not telling you what I’m thinking right now” is true on one level and obviously not on another. It’s self-contradictory. A paradox.

Life—or at least life as it’s expressible and expressed in language—is full of paradoxes. This is true of silly little things like what I wrote above. It’s easy to put together a sentence that simultaneously points to two mutually-exclusive things. For instance: “this sentence is false.” If the sentence is true, then it’s false because it says so. And if it’s not true, it’s false, which means it’s true and correct. It’s a little brain bending to go around in circles like that. Like spinning around to make yourself dizzy, but cognitively instead of, uh, vestibular…ly.

But life is also full of serious paradoxes that go deep into our psychology. Like, for instance, it makes sense that the more you love life, the more you’d fear death. But actually what we find is more like the more someone fears death, the less able they are to love life. But if they don’t fear death doesn’t that mean they don’t love life? (Credit to Mark Manson for that one.)

Paradoxes like this aren’t the point of this email. Also, they are. (Really, now, what did you expect?)

What I mean is, I’m not going to go down into the weeds about what paradox is or why it seems to be a feature of reality or anything like that. For one thing, I don’t think I know much about it. For another, I think it probably just has to do with the fact that language must be expressed from a perspective, and reality is too multifaceted for that. There’s always more than one way to look at things, so there’s always more than one way to express things. But those expressed things always must be perceived and interpreted through your own perspective that you’re standing in right now. So paradox comes down to the fact that you looked at something from over there, and now you’re looking at it from over here, and you can flip back and forth between those perspectives pretty quickly in your mind’s eye. That’s disorienting from an ontological perspective but reality itself has no problem with it.

Did I say I wasn’t going down into the weeds?

You remember that Alanis Morissette song, “Ironic?” And how all the pedants love to nerdrage about how none of the anecdotes in the song are actually ironic? (What? ME, guilty of that very same thing in my younger years? Never!) But then there’s the fact that analyzing the song in that way means you’re missing what the song is pointing at, which is that life is fickle and beautiful and devastating and surprising all at once (paradox). So the fact that the lyrics of the song called “Ironic” caused me to think the song was about irony instead of seeing what it’s actually about? Seems pretty ironic.

One last thing today. There are thoughts I shared with you here, clearly. And there are thoughts I didn’t. For one thing, I did some editing and rewriting. For another, there’s stuff I just didn’t want to share with you (is that hiding, Michael?). And then there’s all the crazy monkey Michael babbling that doesn’t make it into these emails. (Well, let’s be fair: I can promise at most maybe 15% non-babbling in my emails, but more than that depends on the week.)

The thoughts I chose not to share with you are mine. If I choose to hold onto them, there’s nothing you or anyone can do to take them away from me. Ok, fine, I guess someone could torture me until I lost the thought or just kill me. So there are some things that would work, but let’s save the torture/murder talk for a future email. I don’t have it in me this week. (And if your brain didn’t jump to torture/murder like mine did, you can rest easy tonight in that you’re not the creepiest person reading this email!)

Anyway, the point I was making is that my thoughts are my own.

“But wait!” I hear you say. “In your last email you said ‘my thoughts are not my own!’ Aren’t you contradicting yourself?”

No, no, no. What’s this email about? I’m not contradicting myself. If anything, I’m paradoxing myself. My thoughts ARE my own. And they aren’t. There’s no truth of the matter here, just perspective.

In fact, I’m coming around to the idea that there are no profound truths. Or, if there are, they are easily stated in banal sentences like, “there are no profound truths.” Paradox again.

Well, I’m out of gas, so that’s all for this week. Next time I plan to hook up this idea of paradox/perspective/no-truth to what the heck it means to be authentic.