Siddhartha? Is that a foreign car?

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-Walt Whitman


Of course, I contradict myself. All the time.

I like to think I have a healthy mental life and even imagine that somehow I am “deep” when thinking about the course of life. I imagine that I am profound or original when ideas come into my head. This is all laughable when these things are quickly shot down by the invisible forces that control the world. Call it “the fates”. I’ll give you an example.

For some unknown reason, Hesse’s Siddhartha passage came into my mind:

Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart,
with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement,
without an opinion.

Why this passage came to me while I was going to get some takeout food, nobody knows. It’s ridiculous. So, as I entered the sub place, I silently told myself that I would consciously try to achieve, however briefly, a state without desire, without passion,etc. After paying for my food, I sat down in a booth to revel in my Buddhist reverie, to drink in my spiritual awakening.

There, directly in my line of sight, sitting near the window, was my sudden downfall. She was young, blonde, tan, beautiful and in full summer nuevo attire: hardly anything covered. I was practically spellbound by that vision and laughed to myself how quickly the notion of any quietude evaporates (at least in my case) when that distraction is present. She was a vision.

One thing true to my life: whenever these thoughts gather up a storm in my mind there is, without fail, an event that blasts away all these notions. It's almost as if The Great Bearded Guy is saying,

"Dude. One self I sing. Remember? That cat understood. Contradictions? They are ok. Contradictions are the stones that line the road of truth. The ones that the hypocrites never travel."