Final Cut Sutra

By: James Slider

This is just one of those notes where you notice something about life that you want to write about, so if you have a spare minute read it over, if not, don't.

I was walking home from class today, against a constant stream of people. Each had their ipods in, heads bowed down, dead to the world. It seems that each person here makes a constant effort to seal themselves off into a discrete social environment, apart from anything they find displeasing or are not force fed by a professor.

This observation led me to thinking about the way we life our lives. We constantly edit our own existence. Just as in a movie, we fade up on parts that we feel are important. These "destinations" in life are the only part we pay attention to. Each transition between these destinations, moments we feel we should be enjoying, is faded to black, or simply cut. We lay our eyes safely on the cracks of the sidewalk, turn our volume up to drown out the noise of the outside world, and forget what it means to be part of a whole.

Our essential mistake is that life is not just a series of destinations, connected from dot to dot and joined by the resulting lines of meaningless existence between arrivals. Reality is more like a river, a continuous flow of perceptions and sensations, recreated and interpreted in our thoughts. If we choose to edit out the time between each place we go, more importantly, if we choose to zone out for things we feel we shouldn't enjoy, we are losing a huge amount of the experience that is life. If you spend every day blanking out class, your job, the walk home, doing the dishes, and a myriad of other experiences, we are editing out an enormous portion of the time we have to exist.

This is an invitation to be present for your own life. To watch the extended version instead of the abridged. To live in sentences instead of syllables. Enjoy exactly where you are and what you are doing all the time, not just when you get somewhere you thought would be fun of you heard should be fun.