Sentiently being

I think therefore I am. Decartes. I feel therefore I am real. Am I? What am I?

On feelings, the science of the brain, and the value of anything.

I am not sure what I even want to say. I am sitting at my desk, eating chocolate, drinking tea that’s supposed to help against the blues. I haven’t been so well. I haven’t been very diligent with the tea. Feelings have overwhelmed me, time and time again. They’ve tied me to the bed, and made me eat chocolate for meals, and made me watch old comedy tv in an attempt to escape my own head. I know it’s no good, oh I know. I know. How can it be that we don’t do what we set out to? How come I produce little to nothing when no one forces me to? Intention-behaviour gap, the psychologists call it. It is a fancy word for the fact that I have been wanting to learn chinese for three years but can barely introduce myself. Psychology, as a discipline, aims to understand the human brain. What a feat! And so many ways to go about it, too. However to explain the complexity of this central control unit, this mass of meat, this jelly-like instrument frequented by little electronic shocks, that makes up everything you are, everything I am. It filters everything we believe to know, moves our limbs, delivers purpose to even the farthest outskirts of the unit that is one body. It makes connections between different information it receives, it understands, it paints the picture of a whole, of a world that can be known, and interacted with. And the picture is projected onto an imaginary canvas, the self, which is made to believe it has power, that it is anything more than a shadow theater of the workings of the brain. That’s only some of what I’m thinking and feeling. Sentiently being.