The invisible friend
The night was still preparing to welcome me, but I could not bring myself to abandon my timid conscience, shaken by the action film I had just watched, the last James Bond, beautifully shot, poorly written, nothing to turn away from tradition.
I don’t fall asleep, because I feel this mini-regret for not having accomplished or obtained everything I wanted without having identified what the day’s program should have been.
Our days often go like this. We believe we own reindeer while our stars, our sky, our destiny are influenced and driven by sophisticated, nameless machinery. All these gestures, wrongly inspired or skillfully calculated, all these desires, all these mistakes made for them, all these cleverly constructed reasons, all these certainties that do not hold up in the slightest breeze, all these hesitations that make us poets, all these regrets that feed our fits of anger. Peace does not easily come when it is time to fall asleep. However, we end up closing our eyes, we become motionless again to give the body time to finish the arithmetic of what has been lived, unconsciously or not, most often without our knowledge.
It is said that the unconscious is neither the reservoir of our frustrations nor an animal living in the ancestral forest of our impulses. The most recent discoveries of neuroscience lead us to believe that man’s best friend is not his dog, but his brain, that he is the Great Filter, the Great Authorizer, the tremendous response for our happiness and our adventures (the brain is an eternal optimist who crosses the boundaries of our fears for us). We surf on the extensive work of our minds. Our ego, our subjectivity, is told all the lies we want because no matter what we believe, we must leave it to our bodies to lead the boat. Otherwise, we would sink. This impressive process is certainly not flawless, and we should not simplify and think that we would only be irresponsible, puppets in the hands of an opaque biological machine.
Nevertheless, if we have to admire and pray, it is not before God, but before the altar of our Unconsciousness. Meditate, then let yourself go to the game of life. We live to survive. We discover it every day, we refine Darwin’s conclusions, we are as much a vast universe as a cloud of simple dust among a larger cosmos. What is there to understand about all this? What use is this in our quest for our food? I don’t know about that. I don’t understand that. I’m speechless. I may be heading for disaster or beyond despair. It’s dizzying.
