Sometimes, in life, there is a fog around you. It's like you're riding on a highway and the weather is changing every few miles. The most common weather seems to be - well, I would say gloomy thunderstorms, but that's a weather I actually enjoy. Any weather that should be horrible - that society considers horrible - is something my lachesism makes me love.

But the predominent season experienced in this highway of life is a... let's call it a fog. The most uninteresting fog you can think of. It's not even a cool, comforting fog. It is an uncomfortably warm and humid fog that stops you from seeing anything beyond a few meters. The clouds, mountains, fields and flowers all become memories. For the next few miles your world is one of abstractions, where every beautiful thing the books and the poems insist exist, are just memories in your mind.

The fog has an insiduous grip on your mind. You find yourself slipping into that spiral of thought which wants to convince you that a fog is all there is. That beautiful things are dimly twinkling stars, sparsely scattered across a light-polluted grey-black sky. That the world is mostly fog, the highway is mostly fog, and life is mostly fog. What even is the point of driving?

These paragraphs are a fog. Whether or not this fog clears up by the end of the essay depends upon whether I was writing this when I was in a fog in life or in a clearing. At the moment, a clearing passed by recently - it's memory is fresh in my mind. This small patch appeared to be clearing, but then it got denser again, and hope seems to be slipping away. That's what these words will probably seem to be doing as well - still optimistic about the good times, but slowly losing hope to see mountains again.

Why? Why do we ask 'why'? Does knowing 'why' help in any practical sense? Does practicality help? Do we even need help?

Do we even need help?

Self-help seems to advise you newer and fancier ways to flail about your arms to move the fog away, but, it obviously doesn't help. The fog comes when it pleases and goes when it pleases.

Conventional wisdom says the coming and going of the fog is the one thing about the world that can be counted upon - whether you keep moving or whether you stand still trying to fix nothing. The fog, however dense, is always in motion, and a clearance is always on the way. And every clearance, not matter how brilliant and crisp, is always temporary, with a wall of the fog always on the way.

How can intellectual abstractions of the ephemerality of states be the respite in a model of the world insistent on grounded mindfulness?

The roadside flowers that were mere foregrounds in good times, but are now all we can see, and the once blinding sun that now looks like a dim bleached moon behind the fog, should act as anchors for a beautiful world temporarily hidden from us. Seeing them as anchors and cultivating an appreciation for them is perhaps the endgame of a life lived in a recognition of suffering juxtaposed with the inability to do anything about it, while succesfully managing to not succumb to delusional, overcompensatory and unnecessary cynicism.

Anchors and hope. Are they all we need?

Do we need anything at all?

Cats and dogs don't care. Continued memory from which we can derive abstractions is our curse. Maintaining or predicting things to always be the way they are (or the way they should be) is our curse. Animals are equally sad in the fog and happy in the clearance, regardless of how many times the weather changes. This cannot be because of an understanding of change being constant in life - they do not have the intellect to do so, as far as we know.

Perhaps that's exactly why they are unable to be anything but mindful - they have no sense of themself that continues to exist when the weather changes.

When the fog comes, we think "I am sad", and since the concept of "I" is so enduring, it seems to have some emotional inertia after the fog clears. The "I" continues to be sad, and needs mental effort to switch gears. Then, when the fog returns, the "I" resists the change and tries to hold on to the images of the beauty it witnessed. The "I" wants to be preserved, wants to be constantly reminded that there are still links to that beauty, links to that outside world inside this fog. The flowers and the puny mindfulness and the pathetic attempts to flail away the fog immediately around us are done to feel like there is something getting preserved.

Unintelligent animals are two abstract entities - the subject and the experience. Humans maintain three - the subject, the experiencer and the experience. For some reason, we are unable to let go of the experiencer - everything that happens in life happens to this image of who we are rather than directly to us. Nearly every horrific thing humanity has done to itself has been out of this attempt to preserve something that doesn't really exist - nationality, religion, cast, legacy - and now, in our self-critical capitalist society, all the self-preservation has gotten focused inward. We are constantly taking care of ourselves, all the time. Rather than being sticks of calcium with lumps of meat being controlled by electric jelly, directly interacting with and being a part of the world, we come up with an intermediary - an abstraction of our idea of ourselves that is interacting with the world which needs to be strong and enduring and in need of preservation. When I mentioned the sticks and meat and jelly above, the entity that you pictured as experiencing the world and conjuring up the "I", is, in fact, the "I". We are the world. There is no experiencer. "We are the universe experiencing Itself."

All of these words are ideas and abstractions too. Abstractions have led us to do some wonderful and some terrible things. Abstractions about the world are great. Abstractions about oneself - not so much. They cause more harm than anything else. I wish one could remember this fact as easily as one remembers their name, and call upon it each time we catch ourselves abstracting. There needs to be some way of disengaging our identity and experiencing in a direct manner. Hopefully, that this outlook itself at least exists, albeit in abstraction, should be a good start.