I can simply close my eye and peek inside my brain. It looks and feels like an attic or an unfinished basement in my mind’s eye. I see tiny blobs – they are not the neurons, cells, or platelets. They are the rudiments of my belief. They make up the organs of my belief. With distinct shape, color, and feel they create an elaborate structure but your guess is as good as my: How did they dissolve in there? I do not want to look for an answer now ‐it is fascinating enough the way I use them!
When I need to justify my act or intention, I make decorative garland with these beads to wrap around, define, and separate me from others. This garland sometime appears rusty and their tarnished facade confronts me: I neglected them for years! Just like a painter, I hurry to grab a brush made from my current reasoning about how to live a life and start painting the beads. A bright shining color– an extract of vogue ideas or cool tone‐down verdicts of self‐realization ‐ perhaps become my color of choice. I also do a mental‐dance with my minute me, exchange dialogue, and keep painting until I am happy with the result and ready to use them. It all depends – I guess; what I wanted at that moment!
Sometime I feel these unused beads have accumulated – like a fat collecting cell – a lot of debris from the conflicts with rigid theories or ideas that float around me. Sometime I might have tossed at them, hastily, a shawl made out of prudent thinking during my hyperactive daily life. Often, my hasty act continues without being too mindful about the setting. Then the remains of cluttered pile grow heavy. I suddenly feel a bit tired to carry them around. Like a sculptor, my solution then is to start to use my new experiences and knowledge as a chisel to curve out a different, perhaps a unique shape! I keep striking at the stack until I am pleased with my sexier contemporary look.
Habitually I grind and reshape the beads with simply impulses to make “a skull full of mush” of my beliefs. By the time I settle and calm down, very little of the original structure remain intact. I end up with another intricate heap that will make my belief for the period.
So. I believe what I want to believe. The ‘want’ part of this equation revolves around my journey to live – often in downright confusion. Unlike any other voyage, it is full of mysteries, puzzles, and challenges. I rarely find anyone to guide me. I certainly do not think that I am correct all the time. In this world – a shadow of reality ‐it feels like walking on a Mobius strip*. Like a loop with a twist, I just end up at the “other side” of where I started painting, reshaping, and dismantling my minute self. It is often a struggle but at the same time, it is also an enduring hope to find a permanent color, shape, and feel that is globule of my belief.
(*The Möbius strip or Möbius band (pronounced /ˈmeɪbiəs) is a surface with only one side. The German mathematicians August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict discovered it independently in 1858. It is easy to make. Take a paper strip and give it a half‐twist, and then join the ends of the strip together to form a single strip.)