My stomach has started acting up, right on cue beginning the fourth day in Karachi. And I’ve noticed it makes me more thoughtful.

When I don’t feel well, I notice I become quite sensitive to people that I don’t feel are taking care of me in my life. It’s as if I become illumined to my loved ones’ caretaking abilities when I am feeling naturally selfish, as being sick forces one to be. I tend to be very externally-focused generally I think, frequently looking to others for cues on how I should act. I figure this is a pattern ingrained from my youth, which involved many moves to new towns, where I would have to figure out the local culture quickly to figure out how to “fit in.”

So I become repulsed by the selfish people in my life when I am sick, and that might actually be useful information. Ask me when I’m well ;-)

Watching a political discussion on the television in the Urdu language, reminds me of the vastness of the human experience. So many cultures and differences, and yet all connected in one chain going back thousands of generations.

I feel comforted with the knowledge of how many people similar to us have lived on the planet, especially when I start to feel a little existential crisis coming on, which happens more frequently than I’d like to admit. Through some experimental experiences, I’ve come to understand just how interconnected we are as a single organism with many detached, mobile sensors! Even our speech with each other flows in a field of energy which affects both the speaker and the observer, so that it can be confusing who is thinking the thoughts when linked-in with each other. We have done so much work generationally teaching each other how to think and speak for maximum cooperation among different tribes/bloodlines, that sometimes among the complex interconnectedness I start to question and become apathetic about the relative value I am adding, 1/6 Billion-ish.

Earlier today, I was reading an article about the latest climate change science, and a comment was made about how Republicans are so afraid of a global government and global currency and work to maintain status quo (in this case, by funding “hoax” campaigns against the science). It brings me back to story of the tower of Babel, and how just when everyone was seeing eye-to-eye, God confused the languages of the people so that they could not, through their cooperation, build a tower to reach God. In retrospect, this was good, because we know now that humans trying to build a tower won’t actually get you any closer to God. We have left our atmosphere for the moon and beyond, and no material God-figure was anywhere to be found in the heavens.

So perhaps what the people were building toward was cooperation, and in that global cooperation is where God is found. Each of us pictures God according to our understanding, whether a father-figure, goddess, lover, friend, baby, or nature, for example. This is not poly-theistic, in fact, it is the opposite. One God, like the elephant in the room that we see only a portion of from our perspective, is at once omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, Hermes and Aphrodite, living in the polarities and all the spaces inbetween.

So operating as a human amidst an energy that we call God…

I was just distracted by my own thoughts, which happens often. I was thinking that I’ve noticed that the human capacity for self-reflection gets out of control with me sometimes. I think I became hyper-vigilant as a child, as children do when they feel unsafe in their environments. Psychology teaches us that children realize the only thing they have control over is themselves, so they turn their powers inward to calculate and control in order to affect a safer interaction with their environments. If they can become very good at self-reflection before taking actions, they can take some degree of control over how they are treated by others.

My life right now, at age 33, is about unwinding the excess of self-reflection that I needed to protect myself as a child. This makes me think I ought to stop journaling! But I do find my journal/blog entries really insightful in terms of helping recognize when history is trying to repeat itself. Sometimes I will forget the lessons I’ve learned along the way until I go back and re-read my poems or blog posts. My excess of self-reflection makes me a good investigator and has enabled me to see multiple perspectives and act in a pointed way, so there are benefits, but there are also downfalls, namely, spending too much time in being critical of oneself and not taking action, or not being fully present in the moment and attuned to flowing among life’s wonders rather than safeguarding against life’s threats and what-ifs.

And I become quite verbose when ill. Time for a nap.