Looking Beneath the Surface

For some time now I have been unable to write. Not for absence of ideas, but rather, lack of inspiration. On many an occasion I have sat here staring at the screen, willing myself to express just a shred of the mangled up mess of cognitive convolution that swirls endlessly in this cauldron I call self, but nothing ever makes the cut. Unlike some, I do not blog as a means of keeping a digital diary. I do not blog to discuss the trivialities of this, our shared existence. As time passes, I find myself growing ever more critical of what I choose to share. My intentions are neither to impress, nor cater to what I believe you want to hear, although I have been guilty of both in the past. Instead, I find myself weighing the relative substance of my message versus the time through which I might craft its delivery, and lately the two don't jive. However, inspiration always finds a way of slipping past the staunchest of defenses, and I am again moved to speak.

As many of you are well aware I am a bona fide Sci-Fi junkie. There's just something about broad philosophical statements coated in a robotic veneer that I find appealing. Recently, while fueling my habit through an episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, I was reminded of that which has become one of the paramount forces behind my desire to communicate and explore this human condition through prose. The message came packaged in the form of a monologue, and it went a little something like this:

So much danger in this world is hidden behind masks. We tell our children stories of good and evil, while knowing it's not that simple. True evil doesn't give us time to fight. We keep our heads down, never bothering to look behind the masks; and in so doing we resign ourselves to terrible fates we can never see coming.

There are no universal constants, no absolutes. The notion that our existence could ever be quantified through contrasts as stark as Black and White, is perhaps the grandest of all fictions. And yet, it remains our intention to do exactly that. Assumptions, generalizations, stereotypes; all part of the quest to remove critical thinking from our diets. We have developed ideologies and schools of thought, each claiming to provide all of life's answers; and we flock to them based on the allure of not having to reason things out for ourselves. But at what price?