infinite good morning

Good morning. Welcome to a fresh downfall of snow in Montreal. A natural way to get fit: go for a walk on the snow covered sidewalks before the snow ploughs clear a path. In some ways, it's just another morning. One follows a routine. In other ways, it's infinite, depending how you look at it. On a relative level, one goes through various phases of life from birth to death. Each person has a sense of self and feels unique. Each person wants to survive, to avoid pain and to be happy.


Self is a transparent situation, in the sense that life is motion. Motion is change. If the heart stopped beating or the brain stopped sending messages, the body would be a corpse. To freeze things and keep things the same is something a confused ego might try to do. But to resist change, to cling on to the moment would create suffering. No matter how much you would like summer to last forever in Montreal, each year, summer fades into autumn until winter takes over and eventually spring happens. No matter how much you would like to be eternally young, with smooth skin and lots of stamina and flexibility, eventually the skin loses its elasticity. All sorts of growths and blemishes take over. The skin becomes like a botanical garden. One's body is less flexible. Joints ache and so on. Self or a sense of being alive and thinking is a situation in motion. It's not possible to locate and freeze a concrete entity and present it as being the essence of self.

It would be fun if people could take turns jumping into each others minds. Probably each person has a sense of self quite similar to one's own sense of self. The only difference would be the content. Each mind would rotate around a set of concerns and have a particular disposition or emotional makeup, one's level of confidence or self-esteem, plus a set of attitudes and beliefs. The sense of being conscious or or a person, the sense of self would likely be very similar in each individual, the sense that "I am me."

Each day is a finite event, with maybe nothing memorable happening. Each day is part of an infinite spectrum of time that has no beginning or end. One's existence comes and goes like a flower growing, blooming, wilting and dying. One's body becomes a corpse, but life continues. Life was there before one was born. Life continues after one dies. One could identify with infinite life or being. That could be a cheerful prospect, a sense of the unlimited. Or one could identify with the finite body/mind continuum, destined to die and feel scared and depressed. Life is a complex process involving an infinite number of events.