"Now I know a disease that these Doctors can’t treat.
You contract on the day you accept all you see
a mirror and a mirror is all it can be. A reflection of something we’re missing.
And language just happened, it was never planned,
and it’s inadequate to describe where I am
in the room of my house where the light has never been
waiting for this day to end.
And these clocks keep unwinding and completely ignore
everything that we hate or adore.
Once the page of a calendar is turned it’s no more.
So tell me then, what was it for? Oh tell me, what was it for?"
"A Scale, A Mirror and those Indifferent Clocks" - Bright Eyes

I have asked before what it means to be free, what does it mean to have progressed, and do we have control? And I have concluded, based on my own rhetoric and rationalities, that we are victims to chaos, to time, to fate. But I am not a pessimist just a realist. It's nice to know I'm not alone.

Yet again, Conor Oberst has written a song that encapsulates similar themes. In this song you can almost taste his pain, a struggle derived from knowledge. Scales, clocks, calenders, all arbitrary attempts to understand the world. To explain the unexplainable. Only to come to the realization that you can't understand the world like that because your life becomes, "a reflection of something we're missing."

But again, Oberst points out that you can not just be happy with an unexamined life, "you contract [the 'disease'] on the day you except all you see" and yet again, we come back to the idea of progress. It's a personal voyage not based on empirical rationality but rather an inward struggle over personal ideals. You can change your mind not the world.

I will expand on this in later posts, in the mean time, throw out your calender but remember my birthday.