excerpts of thought

"Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable."
-C.S. Lewis; A Grief Observed

I'm so glad Lewis said that, because it's an exact articulation at what I've been thinking about a lot lately - the idea that true idealists have no chance of being happy unless they set their hope on Someday.

I find myself staring at the women doctors here. There's this one that is extremely gorgeous. Foreign, and has the most beautiful accent. The medical terminology just sort of rumbles beautifully out of her. I'd like to stare at her a lot. And then become her.

But I don't know about this doctor thing. Intellect doesn't usually work out so well for me. It gets me all screwed up. It seems like when I try to use it primarily, I just end up with more questions. No answers. And instead of finding out answers to answerable questions, I try to find answers to the questions that can't be answered intellectually.

I have been thinking lately about timelessness. That has a lot of significance, especially in the realm of the whole predestination/election thing. the absence of causality has huge significance. I just think there's no way we can comprehend fully not being bound by time...things not causing each other...there not being an existence of "before that, this." There is no before. There only is. and not even that, because our comprehension of is, means it's not was or will be. Even more baffling than timelessness is the concept of timelessness and timeness intermingling with one another. How can this be? So maybe it's not that God chooses us, and then we follow Him, and it's not that we respond to Him and then He presents Himself to us, maybe there's much more of a timelessness factor in the whole thing, even in our responses, that we can't understand, because we can't know how our actions and lives are judged and recorded in a world with no time. who are we really? well, in a world of no time, we are all that we ever were, all that we are, and all that we ever will be all at the same time. and we are doing all that we ever did, all that we are doing, and all that we will ever do all at the same time.
This changes my ideas drastically about election and predestination. it makes the debate obsolete in my mind. Does God elect people? And if He does, on what basis?
I can't know. But it has something to do with the enigma of "fair" and "timeless", two things that don't exist in our realm of understanding.

I've also been thinking about the relativity of adjectives. In my world of nursing students at PC, I'm pretty smart. But here, I feel dumb because I am dumb. All these words are relative. Size. Dumb, smart, knowledgeable, rich... How can words like that even exist alone? They don't mean anything by themselves. How the unseen powers must jeer at our evidence of pride by semantics. We know nothing of rich.

And how experiences define words. You thought someone was smart, but then you experienced someone smarter, and you look back, and you think the first person wasn't actually smart. You just thought they were smart. But now that you have a clearer picture of what smart is, the first person and "smart" don't mix.

This is why we have comparatives and superlatives.