Its very late; more conventional people have long ago turned in, but we have stayed up, to read, to think, to talk with a long forgotten person: ourselves.
Late night is when big things may at last have a chance to happen in the mind.
Night is a corrective to the demands of the community. I may be a dentist or a maths teacher but, long before that happened and still now when I am allowed to commune with myself, I am simply a nameless, limitless consciousness, a far more expansive, un-anchored figure, of infinite possibilities and rare, disturbing, ambivalent, peculiar, visionary insights.
The thoughts of night would sound weird to my mother, my friend, my child. These people need us to be a certain way. They cannot tolerate all our possibilities and for some good reasons. We don’t want to let them down; they have a right to benefit from our predictability. But their expectations shape us, make us who we are, and choke off important aspects..
However at night with the window open and a clear sky above, it is just us and the universe – and for a time, we can take on a little of its boundlessness.
Being Up Late at Night
Its very late; more conventional people have long ago turned in, but we have stayed up, to read, to think, to talk with a long forgotten person: ourselves.
Late night is when big things may at last have a chance to happen in the mind.
Night is a corrective to the demands of the community. I may be a dentist or a maths teacher but, long before that happened and still now when I am allowed to commune with myself, I am simply a nameless, limitless consciousness, a far more expansive, un-anchored figure, of infinite possibilities and rare, disturbing, ambivalent, peculiar, visionary insights.
The thoughts of night would sound weird to my mother, my friend, my child. These people need us to be a certain way. They cannot tolerate all our possibilities and for some good reasons. We don’t want to let them down; they have a right to benefit from our predictability. But their expectations shape us, make us who we are, and choke off important aspects..
However at night with the window open and a clear sky above, it is just us and the universe – and for a time, we can take on a little of its boundlessness.
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