Reasons why you shouldn't point

Have you ever had someone point something out to you, and then, no matter how hard you try, you can't get what they said out of your head?

For me, there's two thoughts that are plaguing me at the present moment.

One: lives of everyone that surround us.

This has been the main one. It's the idea that there are over seven billion people on this planet, and that each one has an individual story. They're dealing with their own problems, their own heartbreaks and their own self-doubts. They've got aspirations and dreams just like you or I.

It seems obvious. But it's kind of mind-blowing when you actually start to think about it when you're sitting all alone in Starbucks. The people around you aren't just there to populate your world. They have their own friends, and their own family. They have a life. They may be strangers to you, a being that is technically only alive when they are in your sight. Because, to a certain degree, the universe only exists within our own head. Our way of viewing the world, unique to us, never to be replicated again. We'll never know what it feels like to view the world through another's eyes. This is it. 

And once you start thinking like that, there's no going back. You become very aware of the fact that you know less than a percent of the world's population, and that you'll never know everyone's stories. Hell, you probably don't even know the stories of the people that are in your life. 

People are very protective of their stories. I think it's because most are ashamed of their past.

Two: life vs existence

“I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on earth. Then I ask myself the same question.” - Harun Yahya

That quote hit me hard. I tried to answer the question that it poses, I don't mind that it was supposed to be rhetorical. 

I think that they stay in the same place because they aren't aware of the sanctity of life, of the beauty of the world. They only have survival in mind. Their only aim to exist long enough to reproduce, to keep the cycle of the natural world in motion. The only time they will move is when staying put would endanger their life, migrating in Winter, for example. 

Humans, for the most part, are the same.

We exist until we are forced to choose between life or death, until we are faced with reality. We will all die one day. We all realise this. But 'one day' usually ends up dictating us, those two tiny words convincing us that we can put off the things that we want to do in life, because hell, we've got time to do that.

We clip our own wings, then have the audacity to complain when we plummet to the ground.

And I genuinely haven't been able to rid my head of these thoughts for the past month or so. 

I'm blaming it on my cyclothymia. When it gets bad, on either side of the spectrum, I start thinking like this. If it's a bad manic episode, then thoughts like this come a mile a minute, and I can write them down. For the most part, I'm happy to deal with this, because it means that I can get a fair bit of writing done. If it's a bad depressive episode however... thoughts of life, death, existence and mortality... the floodgates are burst open, and these thoughts come rushing through. And any articulate part of me is drowned in these thoughts, so I've just got to bear it. I can't talk to anyone about them even if I wanted to.

And that's why you shouldn't point things out to a manic depressive.