Muddy Goose

Journaling

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/15/20

I was watching a suspenseful show. The protagonist was going through some really abysmal situations. I felt a version of anxiety for him and anger at the characters who wrong him and make his life harder for him. But I didn’t feel that bad, because I knew he had a great trait going for him: being the protagonist in a finite show. 

Our hearts beat fast watching protagonists go through challenges, as our hearts beat fast as we go through the challenges of life. There is one difference. We know that in shows, everything will work out fine. The protagonist will win. Although we don’t know how the protagonist will get there, we watch the process with the comfortable perspective of the ending. In our lives, there is seemingly no end. The end is but a theoretical concept. One is the fast heart beat of excitement; the other is the fast heart beat of anxiety. 

So the root of the matter is unease about uncertainty. Shows are not really uncertain in that regard. We know approximately how many episodes the show will have, and above all, we have a general idea of how the ending will turn out. But now that we know the cause (of why we like watching shows but not so much experiencing our own lives), maybe we can try to tackle it.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/14/20

I admire those who put on masks very diligently whenever they go outside of their homes. They have people they want to protect. I imagine if I were living with my parents now, as I had been for most of my life so far, I would be very diligent too, covering my face very tightly even when I’m outdoors, avoiding people on the sidewalks, sanitizing packs of groceries, etc. But I’m living alone. I haven’t spoken to another human being face-to-face in the past few months. I don’t care if I get the virus, or any flu virus, not just the virus. I have no one to protect. I’d just be in my own little box, getting it alone, recovering alone.  

Part of it also has to do with the fact that I never was a germaphobe to begin with. I do basic things like washing my hands when entering the home and before eating, but I’ve never bought antibacterial soap or wipes. I eat food that has fallen. I kind of see life, since we’re interacting with microorganisms every second, as training for my immune system. 

I compare the people in the park wearing masks and myself, who is not, and my conclusion is that those who are the most meticulous and careful are those who are the most connected to society. Homeless people, who have only themselves to take care of, don’t wear masks, for instance. It’s not entirely because they can’t afford masks. Even if masks could be freely taken at community centers, most homeless people probably wouldn’t bother either. I understand their feelings in this point, because I’m the same.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/13/20

Winter is the season of rest. I feel like sleeping all the time. In fact, I feel like sleeping as long as it isn’t sunny out, which, at this time of the year, is nearly every day. On top of that, the fact that the sun rises late and sets early just increases the hours I want to sleep. I hesitated to use the words, “late” and “early”, because they are subjective evaluations. There is no early or late in nature. Early is whenever the sun rises, and late is whenever the sun sets. It is only when we add in an external scale, like the clock, that the concepts of too early and too late arise. Personally, I have no problem with daylight savings time changes. We invented the 24-hour clock to correspond with the sun’s cycle. There is no reason not to tweak this clock slightly as nature changes. 

In a society that prizes doing and aggressive motivational messages, maybe I am made to feel somewhat guilty about my slowness as it crops up. I just remember when I visited Asia some years ago in the summer, the sun there rose at 4 am. My body didn’t wake up at 7 am as I wanted and planned for it to. It woke up at 4 am too, when the sunlight came through the curtains. A 4 am sunrise was unimaginable to me. I thought, “How do these people live here?” But I knew how. Although I got up very early every day, I wasn’t more tired than usual. My body didn’t want to sleep longer. Twisting and turning trying to fall asleep felt more forced than simply getting up. There was nothing 4 am about that 4 am, whether in terms of the birds and energy outside or my own alertness. If you matched my sleep to the recommended eight hours a day, I probably slept a couple hours fewer. 

On the other end of the spectrum, when I lived in Northern Europe in the winter, all I wanted to do was sleep. I already exceeded eight hours a day, yet I could always sleep more and more. It didn’t ever seem enough. 

I think I am quite in sync with nature that way. You can call it being “dependent”. I heard of people using opaque curtains to block out the sun and wake up at a set time and live strictly by the manmade 24-hour clock. I’ve been hesitant to find such a curtain myself. Where would I get the signal to wake up if I don’t sense the sun? Conversely, there is a resistance associated with waking before sunrise too. 

There are naturally periods of increased activity and periods of quietude, in nature as in people. I think besides self-improvement and fulfilling purpose and self-actualization, it takes just as much learning and wisdom to retreat with the body when it needs to. A tree’s leaves need to fall before they can grow, after all.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/12/20

Something that perplexes me about god (I don’t have a god that has a face and name. I use the word “god” as “something bigger, calmer, more benevolent, wiser” than me whom I think would be kind of nice to exist.) is that if god is all-knowing, all-powerful as we tend to think god is, what would it need humans for? Why do we even exist? Why does anything exist? Why is there even a universe? What could god get from us that it doesn’t know already? Such a god would know our next moves before they happen, and if you knew everything, there would be no reason for anything to happen - you see what I mean?

I can’t wrap my head around it. Imagine you play a video game. You play the game, the game entices you and makes you spend all that time, because you don’t know what’s going to happen in the game exactly, what gaming experience you might encounter today. Or if one day humans reach the technology to create simulations just like this world, we would be interested in letting this simulation run and observing it because there are unknowns we could learn from it. If we knew everything at the start already, there’s no reason to let the days tick slowly by, there’s no meaning to time. Things only happen, time only flows, because there are some future uncertainties. 

Doesn’t seem to fit with god, if god is indeed all-knowing and all-powerful. The only explanation that I could logically derive is that god is not all-knowing and all-powerful. There must be something about us that god doesn’t understand fully. That’s why we exist at all. God may be more powerful than us objectively, just like a simulation creator is more powerful and sees more than the people living in the simulation. But there is a spring of power that can be manifested through humankind, which is not in god’s calculator. Humans are vehicles of creativity and insight. Humans don’t create them but simply bring them to the world. God created humans to know what bravery, sadness, happiness can be possible, as humans demonstrate them during extraordinary situations. In that, every emotion, happiness or sadness, has its meaning. Our power and understanding are squeezed out from our extreme emotions. And what is squeezed out when, we don’t know. God wants to see.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/11/20

I’ve been staring at geese for the past few months, but I still notice new things about them. And I wonder why I hadn’t noticed this before, but the webbed feet, they’re flexible! I thought the web was just a web, like a fly swatter or a cooking spatula. The goose walks on those webs, just like a diver walks on his long, installed fins. But really imagine a diver walking on those fins. It’s hard to walk on them. The diver could easily trip. That’s why he doesn’t really. He puts on his fins at the shore at the last minute before entering the water, and on land, walks with his nimble small feet from the parking lot to the shore (how convenient). In the water, wide, webbed limbs find their home, but on land, they are quite cumbersome. Did I think geese, who do spend much of their day waddling about on land (after all, their staple, grass, is a land food), would have such a disadvantageous adaptation that they have to carry around with them constantly?  

Apparent not! Well, their feet are their feet. You can’t abandon that. But I’ve found, geese play a similar trick as divers in that they don’t “live” with their webbed feet. When the goose walks, his webbed feet momentarily turns into something else, “unwebbed”. The sequence of events is, the goose lifts his leg to walk; the web folds inward (like the thumb and pinky coming together) as that leg swings over to the front; finally the web spreads out again and plants on the ground. In other words, geese don’t really drag their webbed feet with them as they walk. In that few fractions of a second when the foot is lifted and suspended in air, the “webness” quality disappears. Their flippers are really only flippers in water and when planted on the ground. They are not flippers anymore during that precise walking motion.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/10/20

Just when I think geese (or animals in general) are like humans in costumes, they surprise me with a novel instinct, one that I can’t grasp as a human. 

The white-headed goose is in its group of eight. I thought I counted eight geese in this group a few months ago around the time the white-headed goose first showed up. It seems this number is correct. I still count eight geese now, of which only the white-headed goose I recognize because of the white patch on its head. It was bending over eating. A few of its pals were eating too. A couple were sitting down.

A very narrow path extended through the lawn. I walked down on it, moving closer and closer to the eight geese crowding around the path. One goose was in fact sitting on the path, taking up the whole width of the path. I proceeded slowly, ready to pause should I see it starting to react to me. The other geese who were grazing on the lawn moved farther away from the path as I came down on it, predictably. Of course, if you were a goose and a human was approaching, you would maintain your comfortable distance. That much I expected. 

Okay, the sitting goose just raised its neck. I think it is more wary of me now. It is thinking whether to stand up and get out of the way. So I paused. What happened next was totally bizarre to me. Some of other geese who were walking away from me turned onto the path and sat down! So now they were even closer to me on the path than the first sitting goose. Okay, just because I stopped walking forward? You see, this is something humans would never do. If you are being chased and the pursuer stops, that doesn’t mean you suddenly go right in the pursuer’s path and sit there, right? I don’t know if these geese are wary of me or ambivalent about me. I’m quite confused.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/8/20

Shoes increase our stride distance. If you think about it, with a long stride, we strike the ground with our heels instead of more the middle of the foot. Striking with our heels makes the knees sad. When we wear shoes though, the cushioning makes the effects of heel-striking less apparent. We just unconsciously find ourselves walking faster and faster, taking longer and longer strides, pulling our legs farther away than our bodies would naturally do, because everyone hurries to get to their destination. Shoes allow them to walk fast, on the heels. When I think about myself walking barefoot, I take smaller, tighter steps just naturally. I don’t even realize what I’m doing until I think about it specifically, as I am now. That cushioning is gone, and the body adjusts to protect itself.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/7/20

I write journal entries to sort my feelings and to share with the world what’s happening with me, this tiny corner of the universe. Sometimes, I write to remember an incident. It is just like a grocery list, except the items are experiences. I want to be able to look back on the memory when I’m old.

Whenever geese are in the park, I stand among them. They graze, poop, chase each other, honk, preen, do anything but pay much attention to me. This day, however, I happened to twist my body around to see what was going on with the geese behind me, and I caught a few geese crossing the path, very close to me, right at that moment. That was a little unusual in itself, because geese usually leave plenty of space between themselves and humans. As these geese passed beside me, another goose walked toward me. Yes, I had to make sure I didn’t see that wrong. The goose was walking toward me; I was the object the goose was pinpointing very clearly in its eyes. 

The goose was right by my feet now, “shoes” more specifically. In fact, the goose displayed its interest predominantly to my shoes. That was the closest thing about me to the goose. The goose tried to reach my shoe with its bill. The first few times, the goose was evidently shy and hesitant. It would come very close to my shoe but would give up in the last second. I didn’t move an inch, allowing the goose to do whatever it wanted to do. After a few tries, the goose finally braved up, and its bill made contact with my shoe. The goose nibbled on my shoe a bit. The bill is actually a pretty hard piece of material, and I could feel the solidness of it against my shoe. 

It was a long time that the goose remained there. In objective time, maybe five minutes, but that was a long time to be stationary in fleeting, variable nature. A few times, the goose looked up at my face from that very close distance. Its neck was raised high and straight, and its two eyes stared directly at my own, the bill right in the middle of its face, compressed into 2D. Geese have brown irises! Sometimes the little head quivered to find the right focus. My knee twitched once from standing so still. The goose caught that as well and looked up at once to find my face, as if asking, “What just happened?” Not just humans, but it seems animals too look at the face to discern others’ moods and intentions. And it is interesting because we don’t think animals look at each other’s facial expressions, and rather communicate through sounds. We don’t even think facial expressions exist in the world of animals. But they look at human faces, as if knowing “That’s where you are. Not your feet or torso or arms, but that face is you.”

Afterwards, the goose left me. It paused on the path for a few moments. All the other geese were grazing far away. It honked once to find its group. Then it just walked straight and away. 

I had never experienced such a connection with a goose before. It feels magical for an animal to find you, instead of the other way around, as it always seems to be. This brought up a memory of last winter when I holidayed with my parents. We went on a road trip near the sea, stopping by various attractions along the coast. One of them was a coffee bean farm. I was standing there and sampling the coffees, completely oblivious, when I felt something brush across my calves. I turned around and saw that it was a beautiful cat, a Russian blue perhaps. I immediately reached down to try and pet it. The cat continued walking and I only managed to feel its tail going through my hand. By this time, all the other visitors noticed the cat as well and crowded around her. The cat was friendly with people and a bit mischievous. It walked between a small girl’s legs, and the girl shrieked in joy. Then a tinge of embarrassment came over her face as she saw that strangers, including me, were watching as well.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/6/20

I guess no day is wasted. One morning I didn’t write and went to the park early instead. It just so happened to be a rare clear day. The sky was blue and bright. Sunlight made buildings appear yellow, orange, or red. Geese love this weather. When I arrived at the park, some geese were already grazing on a small hill, perhaps to be closer to the sun. I alternated between walking for exercise and observing them. Round and round I walked around the field, passing the geese and stealing a look at them each cycle. Then I heard honking in the sky. I looked up and saw a group of geese gliding down. Their wings were spread but still. Their feet were dangling, and their bodies were wide like parachutes. When they almost reached the ground, they started flapping their wings to gain that little bit of lift, cushioning touchdown. Every goose in the flock did the exact same thing, at the exact same time. 

I had the fortune of watching this sequence multiple times, because in the span of my morning walk, many flocks arrived. I suppose that is the time of day geese make their moves. If I had got to the park any earlier, the geese would still be waking up far away and grooming their feathers and stretching their wings, and I would not have seen any. Any later, I would have missed their arrival flights. 

I found out that flocks have their unique personalities. While most flocks honked as they were preparing to land, conveniently drawing my attention to that part of the sky, one flock was as silent as a falling autumn leaf, and didn’t make a sound until it hit the ground. I was walking briskly, trying to sweat a little, when I suddenly noticed a low-flying flock on my 10 o’clock. The next second, the geese zoomed passed in front of my face. The very next second, they landed among the grazing geese on the grass beside the path. Since the flock was gliding, the wings produced no sound. And when no one starts honking, no one does. I have to give those geese props for gauging distance and height so well, being calm and assured when I was so close. Their concentration was impressive, as they followed each other in that fast-paced sky solely by sight, without any auditory signals. 

Leaving the geese to their grass, I then walked to the lake. A new scene awaited me there too, something I could only see at this time. The water was exceptionally still. The ducks dotted the lake, unmoving. They are sleeping! I thought animals are diligent and early-risers? I was somewhat surprised already to see the geese flying in at a time I thought was pretty late in nature, a couple hours after sunrise. But here, their relatives the ducks are still sleeping! Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about wanting to sleep in…

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/5/20

The hard thing about answering questions is sometimes you don’t believe in the question, and you didn’t know at that moment that you don’t believe in the question because being asked that question primes your brain into thinking you should have an answer to the question. 

I came across a question that asked me, what was my favorite and least favorite subjects in school. It seems like a perfectly valid question. I was going to answer something normal, like “My favorite subject was science, and my least favorite subject was history, wait no, PE, yes PE.” But then I took more pause and felt something doesn’t feel right to me about that answer. I didn’t always like science through the grades, and I can remember this one year when social studies was wonderfully interesting because the teacher made it so. In fact, in school, I didn’t really like or dislike any subject. I found all of them interesting. It was only when I got to college that they told me I had to pick one subject, and one only, to major in. And that became the “like” and “dislikes”. To answer this question now would have been using my current perspective (after having majored in science in college) to see the past, when in fact as I went through the grades, nothing jumped out at me in particular or was left behind. I ate all the vegetables, broccoli, mushrooms, whatever, and liked them all.  

In the end I answered, “It depends on the teacher more than the subject,” a response that doesn’t answer the question but recognizes that the question doesn’t really exist for me. I’m glad I paused and thought and didn’t just blurt out the first answer that came to my mind, the “normal” answer, an answer that goes along with the question, because now as I see it, it wasn’t the original question I would be answering. I would actually be answering, what was my favorite and least favorite subjects, instead of what was my favorite and least favorite subjects in school.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/4/20

There is an unexpected plus in everything. I have to say, if you’ve not already realized this, that I can be quite lazy. My desk is scattered with all sorts of random, unrelated things, from an umbrella to a nail clipper to cords and chargers; my clothes are wrinkly and brown from washing darks and lights together. The ostensible reason is I don’t care. Makes no difference to my mindset. But the deeper reason is I’m too lazy to change things from their status quo.

If I look out at my balcony now, I can see that the wind has blown things from trees onto it. I don’t know what’s the normal thing to do. Do people sweep? Once a week or at least once a month? I just leave it as it is. Looks like an outdoors indoor, the forest floor. This morning as I was sitting here though, I felt something sweep across my peripheral vision. Birds landed on my balcony, picking through the filaments to look for things to peck on. The birds were very small, small as sparrows. I’m not very good at animal identifications. The sliding door, of course, looks dark on the outside. The birds were unaware of me, but I could see them perfectly. They moved light and fast. I couldn’t catch their movements. Everything was a blur from one state to another, but the birds moved too fast for me to even see a blur. All I could detect were discrete, disjointed states, like flipping through a picture movie book.

I remember when I was at my parents’ house and my grandmother visited, she rinsed the rice pot with a hose on our lawn. The rice grains just flowed onto the lawn. “Is that really ok?” I asked her. “No problem. The birds would eat them.” Sure enough, later on in the day, birds would be hopping on our lawn. I found it miraculous how the birds just knew something was on the lawn to eat. I’m sure they couldn’t see it, those tiny grains between the distracting grass blades; or maybe they can. It seems like everything in this world just knows about everything.

I stared out at those birds on my balcony. It was the most peaceful moment of my morning. Peace to me is stillness of heart, but then I also remembered reading somewhere that the hearts of birds beat some hundreds and thousands of times a minute.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/3/20

I was at the intersection, waiting to cross the road. I usually cross this intersection every day, but today was an especially long wait. Many major intersections around here have been automated, but this one, due to being an inner road I guess, still required manual pressing of the button, although pedestrian traffic is quite heavy here. In the time that I stood there, crowds of people gathered on both ends. More and more people just added on. I think what happened was we forgot to press the button (assuming someone else already did), and so a turn was missed. People were getting more impatient and were looking around. Finally, cars slowed down. Before the pedestrian light flashed green however, everyone, on both sides, stepped onto the road. I was confused for a moment, and I had to look up at the traffic light to confirm that yes, it went red. 

Usually this doesn’t happen. People wait until the pedestrian light gives the signal to cross. That missed cycle had a notable impact on people. I think people have an internal measure in them and look at the world through this ruler, constantly estimating the displacement between what they expect and what is actually. They expected to wait a certain length of time at an intersection, and especially since they knew it was longer because they, for no reason, missed a cycle, that prompted some sort of reaction in them. They have to “get back” somehow what they had lost by, in this case, starting to walk earlier than when the signal actually comes on. 

I’ve noticed another thing, which probably also has to do with this internal measure. Signs were put up around my apartment building requesting people to wear masks in the common areas. Since the couple of weeks the signs were posted, I have noticed maybe 10% of people I’ve passed by actually wore masks (even that feels like an overestimation). I honestly don’t think these people are anti-maskers. The reason for their lax here, I think, is that they own their apartments. Subconsciously they feel they should feel more comfortable in the building, more at home. Having to remember to put on a mask every time you step out of your door is obviously not a very comfortable and relaxed mindset. I wonder how the situation is like in a rental apartment building. Strangely, I think I might observe that people are more compliant there, even though there’s no practical difference - you’re still living in your unit either way. This is the work of the internal measure.

[wetooarestarstuff]

12/2/20

Our body is the first child we get to take care of, and maybe one day it shocks you by a pain or ache that you’ve been neglecting it. My body alerted me to this fact recently. I should spend some time a day just tending to this child. I started to incorporate exercises into my day again. Well, so far, what I mean by “exercise” is really stretching, like stretching the hamstrings. I do it because it’s the easiest to do. I was sitting on my makeshift mat after a 20-minute stretch, and the lazy, inertial part of me flowed in. “Since I’ve already set up the mat, why don’t I try a proper exercise, like a push up, see where I’m at now?” So I got into position and realized I could not bend my arms at all. 

Maybe my body was slightly disappointed and surprised, but my mind seemed irrationally optimistic. It had already made the leap into the near future before my body gets there. Skipping past all the hard work, my mind was already imagining how a few days later, if I carried on daily, I would be able to do it more. I’ve had this experience before, where I could not do something and then almost miraculously a few days later, I felt a major improvement, like something had given way. Do muscles really grow that quickly? I wonder. 

To be honest, I think rather than real physical changes, it’s more due to an expectation. I am expecting my body to do these exercises, so the body, which is alive in its own way, fits to the expectation. It is just like a child you’re guiding. You give it some positive expectations. You tell it, “I need you to do this.” It sleeps on this demand for a few days; takes a few days to think about it. Then one day it surprises you. “Here’s a present, ‘Mom’,” because our body does love us!

[wetooarestarstuff]

11/30/20

I’ve always found something weird when I watch geese. A field of geese would be peacefully snipping grass. Suddenly, a goose, as if possessed by a passing spirit, runs at other geese to chase them away from his grass, his spot. His head would be low and watchful like a snake’s, ready to nip at anyone slower at running away. It isn’t the whole motion itself that is weird; it’s just regular animal behavior. But there’s something about the scene, looking from the perspective of someone completely outside of the situation, that tugs on the mind.

The geese belong in their own world, just like, as they say, fish don’t know they’re in water. Only someone outside of the water can know of this thing called water. The geese and I occupy two separate layers. Their lives and mine don’t intersect. I don’t compete with them for food and water. When a goose chases other geese, he might look my way for a few seconds, considering whether to chase me away too. But then he would drop the matter and go back to grazing, peacefully as the moment was a while ago. I am really irrelevant to the geese. I am just like another consciousness, someone “vibrating on a different frequency” as the geese. They look pass me. They don’t chase me and drag me into the situation because we’re on different planes. So that allows me a relatively objective look at their lives and behavior, like I am someone outside of water looking at organisms in the water. 

To me, who feels nothing of the medium between geese, nothing appears different or special about the goose who chases, or about those being chased. To me, everyone looked equal and identical just now. Then suddenly, someone decides to be assertive, and interestingly, all the others accept his role as the “aggressor” and their own role of having to run, even though from my distant eyes, these geese are all the same. There’s no external marking on the aggressor that defines him as an aggressor. In other words, the geese didn’t “need” to run, since there’s no true meaning to the aggressor. Anyone could be anything at any moment, and if he’s firm enough in his belief and actions, all others would accept it. 

Then I think about my world, the world of humans, the layer that’s relevant to me. Confidence is something that comes out of midair. The people who are confident, they just decide to be so and they are.

[wetooarestarstuff]

11/29/20

It is very easy to say false things. By false things, I don’t mean deliberate lies, but that there is a river between our thoughts and words, and it takes some deep digging and skill to find the right words that are honest to our thoughts. Saying something truthful (representative of our inner mind) requires a lot of energy. Going from thoughts to words, swimming across that channel, takes effort. If you don’t consciously watch your trajectory, you may start swimming at an angle and end up, randomly, somewhere shifted on the shore. Communication has to be backed by energy. If that life force is weaker than usual (perhaps it’s late afternoon and we’re tired from having used our brains a lot), then it’s also easy to say imprecise things, things that look coherent on the outside but is prone to be misinterpreted and is totally not the connotation we want others to get. Maybe a lot of times I stay quiet, even with my friends (I added the “s” there to not seem so much like a loner), because I don’t have an excess of life force in me, dispersed by anxious thinking. A sentence takes me an hour of sleep.

[wetooarestarstuff]

11/28/20

The most useless writing mechanic, I argue, is not the semicolon, but the paragraph. 

I once read a quote that went somewhere along the lines of, the only thing that semicolons show is that you’ve gone to college. Doesn’t that quote jolt your soul out of your body a bit? It’s very direct, unambiguous, and slightly didactic, isn’t it? It’s a wide-appeal style of quote that would hit a chord in lots of people. When I read that quote, I felt some dissonance, like I was putting on shoes without socks. On one hand, I think the quote is saying that semicolons don’t achieve anything that other punctuation doesn’t already, and using them is pretentious. On the other hand, the authoritative tone of quote counters the point about semicolons. Semicolons are pretentious, but a sweeping rejection of them is not?

If we had to abolish one writing mechanic, I would vote for the paragraph, although it makes me sad because the paragraph would not even make it on the list in the first place. People love the paragraph so much, so I’m forced to use it. 

Think about it: do paragraphs achieve anything extra? The words and ideas are already on the page. All paragraphs do is break them up. But why is it the job of the writer to explicitly delineate where one idea ends and where another begins? Isn’t the reader responsible for thinking about that too? It should be up to the reader to extract ideas important to himself and decide where he might want to pause a little bit to ponder. As the writer, separating thoughts for the reader is not much different from spoon-feeding information to the reader. 

But I get that that’s not really why paragraphs are popular. Paragraphs as a thought separator is only a secondary effect. The main reason is that paragraphs hold the reader’s attention. Back when there was not much else to do in the day besides plowing and resting, people might have had longer attention spans to read a whole book or a long passage. These days we have so much digital distractions around us that as soon as we see a big block of words, we give up before even getting to know what it is about, whether we might enjoy it. We prefer to inhale in small, bite-sized pieces. Paragraphs serve as milestones for readers in a way: Yay, you have made it here, now move on to the next paragraph! Yet when you remove the paragraphs, that big block of words is no different from shorter blocks of words with empty lines between them. It is absurd to say that paragraphs add anything meaningful to the message.

But readers aren’t the only ones afflicted with ADHD. Writers may be too. Something that may happen and may already be happening is that writers write with paragraphs in mind. They think up ideas in terms of this paragraph construct. It is like someone gives you a square box, and you start to think what can I put in this square box (reminded anyone of the high school five-paragraph format essay?), instead of what do I have, then I’m going to make a container for it. The fact is our stream of thought is continuous. Paragraphs are artificial breaks that we insert later. But slowly, writers may just acquire the habit of doing it the other way around: start with the paragraphs, not the limitless thought.

I actually like using semicolons and find them pretty useful. Semicolons add another layer to ideas. Full stops are for separate thoughts. Conjunctions like “because”, “and”, “but” explicitly state the relationship between two clauses. Semicolons are an intermediate between full stops and conjunctions. Maybe your two thoughts are closely connected, but you don’t want to “give away” the relationship between them, or the relationship between them isn’t clear and is up for interpretation. In that case you might want to use a semicolon, as neither full stops nor conjunctions feel right.

Semicolons add subtlety to writing and may be most analogous to real life: Oftentimes events are not really connected but they’re not unconnected either. Using something like “because” would be over-describing the relationship, like when you use a complicated mathematical equation to fit a graph, you risk overfitting it. Semicolons show that a potential relationship is there, but the exact relationship may not be as simple as “because”, “and”, or “but”. 

Paragraphs, on the other hand, take away subtlety. Different people reading a plain, unformatted passage may come up with different locations of pauses. When paragraphs are used, the writer gives people the “right answer” straight away by telling them what to think and where the emphases are. 

Since when is adding subtlety a bad thing and removing subtlety a good thing in literary writing? “The only thing that semicolons show is that you’ve gone to college”? I can’t say I agree with that at all, not until paragraphs are similarly scrutinized.

[wetooarestarstuff]

11/27/20

It was another rainy day. The fields were bare. I had prepared not to encounter the geese today when I suddenly saw a group of brown things by the edge of the lake. There were about twenty of them, just by themselves, singled out from the bigger flock that filled the park earlier. Likely the flock scattered a bit, and smaller groups went wherever they liked - there are tens of parks in this region after all. But here, a few geese were dallying in the water, ready to walk out. Among the ones already grazing on the lawn, I heard chirps. So there were teenagers here. An assertive energy permeated this group, as there were multiple occurrences of geese chasing away other geese. Evidently, some were rather protective of their personal space. A closer look and I realized one of the geese doing the chasing was also chirping. This was new to me. I had never seen a teenage goose being so out-there. Teenage geese usually seem mild and subservient, without much ideas of their own. Beside this fierce young goose, another, slightly larger goose was also chasing others. I had a feeling these two geese belonged in the same family.

I should say here that there is something special about this location where the geese were. This spot by the lake was where, earlier in the summer, the breeding families of geese frequently stayed. Did an idea just occur to you? Yes, I was thinking the same thing as I was watching the group. The smaller, teenage goose doing the chasing reminded me a lot of the only-child gosling. In fact, I am almost certain he is (or she; I’ll just say he for simplicity). (Remember that when the only-child gosling was even younger, without the full brown coat he has now, he was already copying his parent and fearlessly chasing other geese?) The other goose with his neck down must be the parent then. The one-gosling family, which was just the lonesome three of them, are in a bigger group now. These dozens of other geese are whom the one-gosling family feels the closest to in this world of geese. But this is the only-child gosling’s place, his place of birth, and maybe he’s especially protective, territorial about it.