Uncomfortable truth

January 5th

“Our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Carl Sagan, 1995

Carl Sagan, a great man, and someone I sorely miss as a voice of reason and fighter for the scientific truth for so many years, wrote that quote in a book about the global epidemic of stupidity. That human disease, fed by social and mass media, only entrenched itself even deeper in our consciousness and psyche and in society at large in the last 27 years since it was first published. But that is not the subject of what I want to write today — I want to apply those words to me.

Can I distinguish between what feels good and what is true? I don’t think I can. Yet. I am aware of that and of the fact that I take an easy way out or pleasure over the potential unpleasantness and discomfort more often than not. Being aware of that is no longer enough for me, or an excuse for continuously doing the same thing. Am I being afraid of the truth? Very likely, yes, I am afraid of the truth. I don’t know what exactly is that truth I am afraid of, though. I stick to my mundane daily and weekly rituals, and when something changes that set of things I do, even temporarily, I immediately lose any happiness and good mood I previously had.

That won’t do.

I don’t want to go through my life afraid to be noticed. I don’t want to have regrets in the future about choices I made or rather NOT made. And regarding regrets — I already have enough of them. My whole previous drunken life was one huge regret. And since I learned how to let go of what happened in the past, I don’t want to go through this process ever again.

I feel like my life is becoming too boring, too predictable. I seem to be going back to the old, safe, well-known reactions and behavior of timid and scared me. A gray mouse afraid of its own shadow. A guy as bland as tap water, and just as colorful. I know how I’ve changed myself and my life, and I will not be afraid to show it to others.