I lay down before you

as much as I am willing to.

–

Sometimes, you kind of want advice without strings attached.

You look for general advice surrounding circumstances that have only happened once in your life.

It makes things difficult for people to advise you. After all, advice, whenever rendered should be tailored as much as possible.

When you withhold details, though, what does it mean?

It means that the person you’re asking advice from is not someone you can trust fully one-hundred per cent.

It could also mean that the person you’re asking for advice from will (in your opinion) alter their advice depending on the context of the situation and you don’t trust that because (maybe the truth is that

you’re not looking for advice.

you’re looking for a method, a justification, or a something to fill in a decision you have already made for yourself.

You have a desired endpoint, but you’re looking for a way to get there, or for a way to explain and justify why you want that endpoint.

–

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it, but there’s sometimes this disconnect:

People tend to make decisions based on emotions, based on feelings.

Yet, “Because I felt like it,” is often considered to be a poor reason.

A poor, weak and flimsy justification for why people do things.

–

I know I’ve mentioned that we like to ask for reasons, and this is an attempt to understand how people function – an attempt to reduce people to their core values and principles and from there extrapolate how people would reply or act in future scenarios.

Understanding the past is important only in predicting the future – the past has no inherent value beyond the lessons we can apply in the to-be-s.

But if the final realisation is that people are driven by their emotions and that justification and reason comes post-decision, then, how does one predict anything?

–

But that they can be justified at all speaks volumes – it hints at and gives us hope that there is a ‘something’ that can be distilled and tested over and over.

If each time, the justification is the same, then the decision is constant, driven by the same emotion and each repeat reinforces the justification till that and the emotion are the same.

That or, that somewhere along the way the person has come to believe in the justification being grounded.

–

A curious question to consider is then, “Why do you need to justify anything?”

Today, a reply I got to that was, “Well, you don’t have to.”

I don’t know how to reply to someone who tells me that we do not need to justify anything.

Beyond decisions as a “confluence of factors” if we left everything up to chance then sure, let’s go ahead.

(the truth is that truth is relative. Nothing is actually really true. Because it can be true to me and false to you. Nothing changes and nothing actually matters.)

–

Blood and ginger mingle on my fingertips.

–

The little one came to deliver coconut water. (Juice? Can it be called coconut juice? What does juice mean, anyway? Hard times these are, Juice is to me as Horses are to Sissy.)

–

Everything is a choice – everything that is before you is a choice.

“Living a life dictated by others and killing yourself are choices.”

Being given a choice like A or B, even if B entails dying is still a choice.

If someone tells you that you don’t have a choice – as long as the choice they give you isn’t dying, well, there you go, I have said another choice.

Is dying better than no other choice? I guess you make that decision.

There is a choice.

But is there a value in being given the choice if you are going to be skewed and steered toward a particular choice by the nature of your options?

It’s funny also how quickly people backtrack and at first, they said, “There is always a choice,” and then they qualify it with, “Unless you mean…” and the truth is that the latter half has our proposed alternative choice.

A choice to die.

A propitious site for a grave – the feng shui is good. There is no rain but, bless, there is a gentle breeze.

The backtrack is given the context that they apply for themselves because you do not explain that your context is this social construct, the obligation and expectations that you have to somehow meet.

How do you, in the face of a plain “You do not have to be good,” explain that society obliges you to explain yourself?

That “I felt like it,” does not erase the inconsequential (in the short term) demerit point you take for late-coming.

If you have too many then, of course, the consequences of your actions become clear. Still a choice. A choice with strings.

–

So sleep, sleep still

disregard the work until you are

drowning

dying

and sinking

sunken knee-deep in it and you cannot breathe.

I’ve been trying for a while but the end result

is that there is no last resort,

no do-over either and I wanted a refund

on the time that I spent, I have no rebates

and I have also yet to be repaid

in full the debt owed to me.

What debt, what justification,

what obligation?

The reply given to me shows not their ignorance but

a willful dismissal.

I must think highly to expect them to understand exactly my train of thoughts.

Was I desperate for someone’s vocal affirmation?

For I did not find it.

I go back to pruning yellow branches.

I spend my time elsewhere, on simpler things.

 

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