#philoblr

watch me pretend that my moral compass is not constantly spinning around as if experiencing an external magnetic field.

I grow my houseplants in a semi hydro setup, in LECA.

This type of post is lovingly called root porn in the semi hydro community XD

Philodendron Billietiae, Alocasia Frydek, Syngonium Albo, and 2 separate Syngonium Mojitos however one has lost it’s variegation. )’:

When people say you find yourself when you move out, what they mean is that you find out how to govern yourself. You find out your priorities, hobbies, and habits. You decide how you decorate and how much money you are allowed to spend. You discover what you value. You get a glimpse of yourself when no one is watching.

You might realize you are not the labels that define you. Nor are you the person society expects of you. You’re not your past or previous actions. You’re simply experiencing existence. A consciousness defined in stone, despite being made of flesh. Maybe we are our thoughts, which by nature are fleeting and temporary. Did I find myself after moving out? Who am I looking for? The answer is subject to change.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a novel written by Milan Kundera. The bowler hat is one of its motifs. (rolffimages via Adobe Stock)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

If someone offered you a life that repeated itself infinitely, would you take it? Life as we know it is deprived of weight; for every event occurs only once. Thin and fleeting, the present is inscrutable. The future is shrouded by uncertainty. Friedrich Nietzsche, for one, favoured repetition: the beauty of necessity. A life of eternal recurrence? Divine!

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kunderais a story about the heavy and the light. The heavy signifies fate: the force of being ‘nailed to eternity’, of carrying the ultimate responsibility of our actions by seeing them repeat, their necessity, their reality, and their truth.

The light signifies the present: its weightlessness, ethereality, and the absence of burden.

Which is the correct approach to life: heavy or light? Nietzsche and Parmenides disagree on which is the positive pole.

According to Nietzsche’s eternal return, fate is to be loved. In it we face what is necessary and thereby see beauty. Amor fati!

Parmenides, by contrast, saw splendidness in constancy. He forbade change, let alone a perpetuity of things coming in and out of existence. Reality is unchanging; being cannot be dispelled, regathered, or repeated. Lightness is cherished.

The answer remains ambiguous to us all. Indeed, Kundera’s characters slew between both sides of the dilemma. Though one senses Kundera himself is drawn to the heavy.

Our experience of love (amongst many other things) exemplifies the opposition of heavy and light.

In love you attach yourself to The One: the person with whom you could spend eternity, over and over. Love is therefore heavy: undying and unable to be thinned by repetition. ‘En muss sein!’ Kundera cites Beethoven: ‘It must be so!’ Love is a necessary connection.

Yet, in imagining just one small change to the past, we meet an unbearable lightness. ‘Es könnte auch anders sein,’ writes Kundera: ‘It could just as well be otherwise’.