Seeing Sounds and Hearing Shapes

As we grow old we learn more about the world around us. Our cultures significantly shape our worldview, the institutions built around our identities (family, religion, or lack thereof, governments, schools, etc.) around us form much of what we later call as our beliefs and convictions, and more importantly we are, to use Althusser's term, interpellated by our social, political and cultural identities. We are who we are because of our culture and we react to our culture forming our belief systems, whether we fully follow what societal conventions express or we choose our own sets of principles based on what is available to us, often creating a mixture of beliefs molded out of our own personal evaluations upon first principles given by our direct contextual references (such as religions, philosophies, political preferences, aesthetic categories for what is good or admirable, and other patterns of thinking brought about by our education or our own chosen ways of acquiring these inner senses of creeds we try to live by).

Because of such concretizing tendencies in our striated "thrownness' into the world, we cannot but form our sense of self and beliefs along these fault lines of thoughts, sensibilities, dispositions, feelings and imaginings. I say they are fault lines, because as we grow older they move along different directions, making us adjust our beliefs to the dominant worldview that rules our thinking, imagining and feeling. They may change and move us forward or perhaps lead us to a step backward.

And because these more or less established Weltenschauung provide a sense of center to our beliefs, a sense of disruption maybe felt by us whenever we feel that this established structural center can make us feel threatened, causing us either some form of stress to our slowly being threatened creeds.

As we grow old some of these beliefs would change while others will stubbornly persist because we are convinced of their truthfulness, lest we have to radically alter our way of viewing the world. To what extent we grow holistically depends on how we adjust to these changes and how we rationalize either our persistence to our beliefs or make needed changes whenever possible.

We have been brought up to think logically and follow what is reasonable as the basis of much of what we believe and flaunt as our creeds. I remember Thomas Aquinas, echoing Aristotle's "What has been in the mind has gone through the sense" or something like that.

Many of what we accept as true have been mediated by our logical abilities and retained and accepted by our "selves" as coherent and rational. Thus we form memories out of thousands of experiences (seeing colors, remembering past experiences, knowing how to ride a bike, recalling country capitals, etc.) and sustain them as part of our mind set's ways of thinking, imagining and feeling.

Even our feelings which are responses to external events to our bodily experiences can be committed to memory (although not in a mechanical way). What I wonder at times is how perhaps along our sensitization to dichotomous logical thinking and the neglect of exercising the imaginative functions of our brains, then it makes me wonder how much we are missing. Naturally our academe-bound thinking has been trained to "think" along rational grounds and reject anything reasonable and consider them unworthy of consideration.

Thus, I think will there be a point in human evolution when we see sounds or hear shapes? Beore you think this is absurd, please take time to consider these weird thought.

Anxiety Attacks in an Age of Fast-Paced Living

I have periodic anxiety attacks. Some may think of it as exaggerated seeking for attention or perhaps a mild form of delusion rooted in a need to be understood. Consciously or subconsciously, they maybe right; or they maybe wrong.

My anxieties are usually fueled by a string of future worries - most of which are founded on actually existing concerns, deadlines and tasks which must be done. I guess it's really more of an overly imaginative anchoring of fears, worries and aspirations which are always thwarted by realistic demands of work, family concerns and dreams.

My most common anxieties are about deadlines and often I am full of them. Add to that occasional proddings which are family concerns in nature - a phone call from my mom, some problems with my brother, etc. Occasionally worries about the future - my own sense of security, my fears of growing old alone, my need to pursue my dreams ( I won't let go of them) and my concerns for my parents who have no secure retirement benefits.

It appears that I am just worried and my worrying will continue if I do nothing about it, giving me more sleepless nights, a bad day whenever I report for work, lower immunity, an increase of health concerns - headaches, stomach problems, heart palpitations etc.

What have I done to address this problem? Well, for one I have researched about the nature of it, and I reflected on how it affects me as a person. By knowing about it, I was able to take charge of the fact that it is not completely uncontrollable, that there is a sense to which I can manage it.

The next thing I did was to apply those researches - I had to practice deep breathing, physical exercises (of which I wasn't used to before this) and what my friend said, as cognitive management. In layman's words, simply telling myself that I am experiencing anxiety but I can do something to control how I worry and I can assess that those sources of worries can be dealt with realistically.

My doctor, to my relief informed me that I am still sane and that I need not see a psychiatrist yet.

I just want to be grateful of that fact for now.

Write Again!

I have read somewhere that in order to nourish the craft of writing, one must engage in writing exercises on a daily basis. The comparison links writing with any other human activity that needs refining and fluency. Apparently, this seems true for me too. Although I have swirling ideas in my head and find almost no time to incarnate them on a page (or an online dashboard, in this case) I know that I have to abandon that pointless alibi.

What moves me further is that I have to come to realize that The Annual Palanca Awards are out again. I have shied away from joining the Palanca for varied reasons: ideological biases of juries, lack of time, no inspiring idea worthy of my attention, fear of grammatical violations creeping into my work, ridicule from peers and above all, an empty mind.

I tried perusing samples of worthy works : short fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Many of them actually have little or no "Carmina Burana" sounding background music heralding the grand nature of their themes. They are simply articulations of hearts and minds willing to speak out whatever their authors wanted. So then again, I ask myself: "To join or not to join."