Significance

I think it’s significant when you want to just be in the same room as someone. There’s no need for conversation, but contentment comes from an amicable silence.

I also think it’s significant that we relish in being bored at university, but it’s torture at home. At uni, everyone you want to talk to tends to be a maximum ten minute walk away. Either that, or varying stretches of a thin corridor; the parody of a trodden phone line.

The beauty of being surrounded by people whom you enjoy all the time is that you never have to be alone but if you do find yourself sitting in your room, listening to music on your tod, it’s because you have chosen to be so. Every choice I make here is as insignificant as it is significant, if that makes sense. The time I choose to eat, what I listen to and how I spend my time. These are luxuries in their simplest of forms and I am so glad of them.

I wonder at the number of naked or threadbare feet that have padded along these corridors, drinking tea, holding heads in cradling hands, or clutching favourite games, movies. A soothing union of hangovers, students and equals.

That’s the thing I appreciate most about uni. Everyone is so severely equal, it fits the cliché like a glove. It’s true, we look after each other. After all, friends are just the family you choose, or so they say.

They mock you without judgement.

They insult you without malice.

They watch over you like siblings in your every time of need.

No cruel opinions, no need for lies. All there is is love. We are allowed our secrets, not guilted or goaded into revealing the enemies from our past even if they occasionally trace routes down your face, painting lines for all to see, and for a select few to sweep away.

These are the ramblings of a student thrilled with her situation. I’ve worked hard to get here, to be solid in my own knowledge of the things around me and those things I have chosen to leave behind. Choice…such a minimal yet substantial comfort. The knowledge of choice helps to give you that slap around the face whenever you are feeling low or lazy.

It saddens me that this only seems to occur in the microcosm that is university, otherwise people wouldn’t always bang on about how they are the best days of your life. A peak for sure, but it can’t be all down hill from here. New life creates new challenges…but I think, for now, I’ll have a cuddle and a generalised, philostudental ponder.

At a Violent End, Everybody Prays

We forget exactly how much of what we know and what we want is actually something that has been ingrained into us, stitches in a wound, something that began many years ago, and has led us to this point. Wherever this is.

At a violent end, everybody prays. Religion is something that is still inherited from our parents, and being us? Well. Only seems natural to defy that. We are vicious and determined atheists some of us. But when there’s a gun to your pulse…then what is left to help you? Suddenly, there is a God; a god whom you really, really hope can hear you.

Dark, hey. I escape that loophole of hypocriticality (I’ve decided that’s a word) by being sure in my completely unsure way, that I don’t know, so I currently don’t care. I’ll decide when I cross the shiny bridge of seeing my life flash before my eyes.

I guess I just think that we like to kid ourselves that we are something we want to be. That’s not the same as pretending to be something you’re not, but maybe a more gracious and gentle relative of that concept. Who are we copying anyways? Who is it that we are trying to convince that we don’t care about anything besides living in the moment? Maybe it’s because spontaneity has been a consistent factor of being young, wild and free.

We live our lives the way we want to. Don’t we? It’s not like we haven’t even made a dent on the outside world yet. Oh no wait. As for me, I’ve shuffled gleefully from microcosm to microcosm, finding my place in each one, finding happiness. Happiness is the drug, yearning for more is the weakness, and feeling like you are not fulfilling your potential is the come down.

Potential. A certain comedian called Dylan Moran has some funny words on the business.

“On releasing your potential: Don't do it! Stay away from your potential. You'll mess it up, it's potential, leave it. Anyway, it's like your bank balance - you always have a lot less than you think.”

He’s probably right. Wanting to be awesome and blasé comes with the territory of youth, alongside invincibility, pride, and assuming that you are the first person to have done, well, ANYTHING. We play games. That’s all youth is, really. A game to get you ready for the real world. A game entirely for getting things out of your system, so you don’t fuck up your real life of work, family, happiness and consistency.

I believe I get bored of consistency. That’s why I keep myself busy. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it. But you know, when I really think about it, I haven’t done anything. My parents raised me well, and their parents raised them well, and so on. Everyday life is injected into our very being. You get the odd few who are brave enough to do what we all want to do, and are then punished for it. I can’t decide which would be better…A life of certainty, or uncertainty?

In my seminar this morning I had to define sense from reference. Reference is when you refer to something in the situation/universe around you in your sentence. Sense is when you need nothing but the sentence to know what it means, a common knowledge within language. Now extensions are lists of everything that could be defined by a particular term, for example, “car” can represent any car that was every in existence and will ever be in existence. An extension is in the real world. Our universe. A prototype in the most popular member of the set, baring in mind this depends on the culture. So a prototype of bird for me would be a robin, being English and all. But in America they might say an eagle, I don’t know.

While deciphering these concepts, I wondered how it is our place to define them. Sense. Something that you just know. But we must have learnt it somewhere, and not known it at some point, otherwise we wouldn’t be aware we know it now, see? Ingraining. That’s all language and the process of a lifetime really is.

Just depends how you use what you’ve learnt, and how much you realize you know without even realizing it. Hmm.

The Knowledge of Knowing

Do you ever get that innate feeling of knowledge? Knowledge that someone is lying to you, that someone is upset, or even that the next left would be most advisable, even though you are completely lost.

We have all heard of the supposed sixth sense. There’s the movie, the sayings, and well, the faith. In the same way people have faith in a God they can never see, people have absolute faith in the sixth sense. So what is it? Every human being has what the dictionary calls a “sense organ” whose sole purpose is to receive information from the outside physical world. Well that’s it right there. The physical world. Sight, Smell, Touch, Taste and Sound.

The Sixth Sense:

- An ability to perceive things in ways, which transcend the use of the traditional five senses; also known as intuition or inspiration.

- Insight: grasping the inner nature of things intuitively.

- To have the power of perception in addition to the five senses. It is also a popular term for ESP.

Now we could go ahead and get really wrapped up in the realms of ghosties and ghoulies, but that’s not my intention. I think people get to worked up about the unknown, and I would say it fair to say, that the whole concept of a sixth sense is yet another way of explaining away the things in this world that we just can’t explain. Some say it’s down to pheromones, these instinctive choices and knowings (poor word but oh well) are down to the base need to reproduce. Maybe. And others say it’s just magic.

Everyone knows the saying “the eyes are the window to the soul.” I have complete belief in this. I know when someone is lying to me, or withholding something from me a good 90% of the time if I am with them face to face. I don’t know why or how, but I tend to be right about liars, and first impressions. My girl across the hall would probably confirm this; sometimes I’ll tell her in a very Mighty Boosh-esq way “I have a bad feeling about now.” Like I said, I tend to be right.

I’m not bragging, merely observing this, sense, if that’s what we want to call it, objectively. It has been suggested, that by saying that you have a bad feeling about something, your subconscious directs you to create this so. I can understand this; the human mind is clearly a lot more intelligent and perceptive than we can know. In fact, the very best of us only use about a third of our brain, and even less than that consciously.

“sit in a Cafe and read a magazine/newspaper, you'll get a "feeling" that someone has been looking at you, and when you turn your head to look up, sometimes you'll find yourself making direct eye contact with the person that has been looking at you for a while.” – Brian Morgan, random blogger commenter.

What do we know? And how can we know it? At the end of the day, a chair is only a chair because we say so. I guess I do believe in a sixth sense, but perhaps that it is something a lot deeper than the Americanized mumbo jumbo. Not so much magical powers given to the ridiculously intelligent, or those exposed to nuclear waste…more and innate part of humanity that exists within all of us. We all have an appendix, but we no longer use it or have a need for it. I think this deep knowledge is the opposite. It has always been there, we just haven’t realized it yet because it is not a tangible organ to be prodded and poked with sterile equipment in a science lab. I say don’t try and understand, but keep your mind and soul open to the knowledge that you can know, without even knowing it.