The Reality vs. What's Interesting

Photo Credit: Umberto Rotundo/FlickrCC

As a kid, I was always trapped in my own little world. From designing my own video-games on scrap paper to writing dialogues concerning imaginary futuristic worlds. When I got older, my interests furthered into music, abstract art, furniture, fashion, and architecture. My mind always on fast forward.

I leapt from idea to idea with ease and tried to maintain every concept that blurred the past. Every day after school I would tell my mom of the adventures I’ve conceived in my head and the input my friends gave me – their own little personal additions to my world. That’s how I communicated for what feels like forever. But once I hit around sixteen years of age, that’s when things changed.

I realized everything I ever thought about, besides game design perhaps, was just so obscure and I had no idea how to apply it to reality. It was such a strange feeling, but I didn’t care. I loved my thoughts and I loved thinking deeply. One person, however, helped change me into the person I am today – Michio Kaku.

Now I know what you’re going to say: popularizer of science, appeals to the layman, doesn’t know nearly as much as other physicists, etc. Call him what you like but he was the only one who could alter my perspective. His string field theory equation baffled me in its symbols and mathematical aesthetic. I was hooked. I began diving into string theory, quantum theory, and all sorts of bizarre mathematical theorems. It was wild.

Finally, something caught up to my breathless pace of trying to process and understand such abstract and incomprehensibly romantic things. And yes, I perceive the experience of the incomprehensible to be very romantic. I may go as far to say that it is, perhaps, the best experience a human being could feel.

From thereon in, I tried finding the hardest forms of science and mathematics and put my philosophical input with it to make things more complicated and spaced-out. I never knew, and still don’t know, why I enjoy complicating things, but maybe it’s the feeling of always being able to know more that gives me meaning.

However, these methods of mental exercise are immensely hard to communicate to others. At times I find it hard to understand myself than to bother trying to get others to understand. Very often I would hear, ”Well how does that apply to the real world?” and the answer in my head would always be, ”Who the hell cares?” I believe raw thought is just as much of an achievement as any prior, present, or future action, even when not applied to reality. At this moment, when writing, I ponder the infinities of reality and the infinities of my mind’s abstract interpretations.

I am now old enough to admire both and embrace them both simultaneously to the best of my ability. Now, however, instead of just highly abstract ideas running track in my head, there too lies every subject man has made to conquer, and I plan to explore them all. I think it’s important to understand reality as much as it is important to understand what it means to be in it, who we are, and what every thought traveling past us means, could mean, and could be.