Overwhelmed with sight

Amanda was that one friend of mine who I had described in an earlier entry as the girl with bubbly, cozy fashion. She was the library buddy, equipped with a pointy elf toque, indescribable winter parka with a purple stuffed heart pin, and a long brown baggy skirt. She threw her arms up in the air when she finished her first semester.

Anyways, walking out of a Bolivian documentary screening, her and I became caught up in a discussion that began with music, evolved to bunny rabbits, progressed to barns, and settled on the world.

“How do you feel about it all?” I asked.

“How do I feel?”

“Yeah”, I replied. “How do you feel, generally?”

She looked away for an instant; an instant quick enough to reveal that her preparation to respond simply required re-surfacing.

“I feel overwhelmed.”

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Last year, about this time, a friend and I sat at a tiny table near to where Amanda and I planned Elanore’s summer vacation. It was in the Killam library atrium, on a Thursday night after attending an Art of Living intro meditation. She told me of a struggle she once went through many years ago. A struggle within her mind. For a period of an unrecognizable length of time her world fell to pieces. Everything she felt was instinctive to an inaugural tone and density. Her psyche was mal-conditioned and stressed to a point where everything she carried with her was an item of obsession, whether based upon colour or sentiment. Every direction she pursued was chased by fear and led by confusion. Days and nights passed without acknowledgement or hunger until finally she was found on the street and submitted to a mental hospital. She was diagnosed as a psychotic and put on some kind of prozac medication. Her imbalance was tamed over the years and her dosage reduced. She has always been considered completely normal through my eyes.

She told me that night how she interpreted her struggle as a cause of being overwhelmed by the world.

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With what I learn every day, it occurs to me the meaning of being overwhelmed.

Amanda said: “My eyes are too wide. I take in so much, but I don’t how to go about thinking of it all.”

For me I’ve come to realise that the proportion of incredible figures and facts have lost tune with me by a similar effect.

My house-mate and friend will be working for a bank over the summer that is worth half a trillion dollars.

The equator of planet earth is rotating about an axis at a velocity of 1100 km/hr.

Black holes are theorized to have gravitational force of such a magnitude that they can force a proton and an electron together to make a neutron in their process of destroying matter.

By energy consumption, my house alone emits 37.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent Green House Gasses into the atmosphere every year.

There are, on average, 100 trillion cells in the human body.

Long Beach, California, has suffered 29 feet of subsidence due to oil extraction since 1947.

It takes 15’000 litres of fresh water to produce one kilogram of beef. Ninety percent of which evaporates before reaching the plant’s roots due to inefficient irrigation practices.

There are 6.5 billion humans on earth, each contributing to the sixth mass extinction of a 4.6 billion year old planet orbiting a 1.989X10^30 kg sun in a 119.7 billion year old universe.

Every day I learn something like this. The significance of these numbers I read, or calculate, don’t always ring within my frames of understanding and perception. There is no way I can ever comprehend most of what I learn by attempting to place it in a tangible spectrum.

My father once tested me for my learning tendencies. It was a computer programmed test; I don’t know how legitimate it was. My results showed that sixty five percent of my brain went about learning through physical activity. I was deemed a “physical learner” and since then I’ve come to aknowledge my tendencies. I’ve been told that the majority of people are visual or audio.

My grasp of infinity brings me back a few years to a gondola strung hundreds of feet above a deciduous forest in Japan. A sea of trees upon which I fixed my eyes had stretched out as far as I could see in either direction. For a duration of minutes I played with the thought of trying to imagine the number of leaves there wer

e in the entire forest. For the first time in my life my imagination grasped what I thought was infinity. I wanted to feel it. I became anxious and imagined counting the leaves, knowing very well that it was impossible.

I recall sitting in the back seat of my family’s mini-van when I was younger. I’d say I was about 13 years old. I gazed out the window on our annual drive to Toronto, as I often did, and admired the size of a 22 wheeled transport truck tugging beside us on a slow moving highway. Yes, I counted the wheels, even the ones which were suspended off the ground. I remember a particular thought which dwelled in my mind on that car ride. I thought about how much the truck weighed, and what that weight meant to me as a human being. I felt anxious, and a little insignificant. I could pick up my mother, and my brother, and most of my friends, but I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I would never get that truck to move. Not even in the slightest. This spun me into thought about how impossible it was for me to ever truly feel the weight of it. Sure, someone could tell me that it weighs so many tonnes, but what does that feel like? What does that actually mean? As far as I could tell, the truth of the fact was superficial, however accurate.

Then I postulated two trucks, one stacked on top of the other. Trying to lift both would be just as accomplished as trying to lift only one. In addition, the effort spent and the effect caused would be identical. I wouldn’t succeed either, not in the slightest difference. My first hand perception of their weight would feel exactly the same in either trial. I reflected upon my sense of vision with respect to my sense of touch.

I knew that just by looking at a double stacked 22-wheeled transport truck I would recognize for certain that it weighed twice as much as a single truck. I’d be as certain as I’d know that the weight of two nickels was exactly twice the weight of one. I would recognize that only because of my mental assumption based upon previously installed knowledge of trucks, combined with my sense of sight. Unlike my perception of nickels which included an additional accurate sense of touch. Within the truck trials, my sense of touch would remain invalid simply for being overwhelmed.

I’ve come to recently imagine the validity of the sense of sight in a scenario where a person was to visually inspect a fully inflated black latex balloon next to a marble. Given that this person knew nothing of balloons and marbles, and given that they have never tried to lift either subject, they would most likely base judgment of the corresponding weight of each object upon visual perception. Upon prompt, and much like in the case of double stacked 22 wheeled transport trucks, the ignorant person would only be logical to pose assumptions based upon the appearance of each object. They would logically call the balloon heavier, simply for a standard assumption.

I guess my train of thought would come to stall at the realisation that feeling something to attest knowledge is the most conformational path to absolute truth, despite what you hear, think, see, read or learn.

I looked at Amanda’s open eyes and asked “Why don’t you close them from time to time?”

“I might miss something.”