Scary depths, Scary breadths

So, I know going into this kind of reading I’m opening a whole can of worms for myself; I’m the kind of person who gets profoundly affected by things I read, and while I read a great variety of things, I do spend a fair bit of my reading time on books of real significance. When I began rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I knew what to expect from myself. ZMM has always affected me very deeply, as has Pirsig’s follow-up, Lila. So even though I’ve been through these works before, and have been profoundly affected by them before, each rereading brings to the fore all the thoughts and reflections I had every time I read them before, and completely color my thinking for days, if not weeks, afterwards.

So, I’m deep into this now. I suppose it doesn’t help that I’m very busy reading this deep, reflective, introspective work at the same time I’m busy doing shallow, meaningless, inconsequential work in a call center that, thankfully, at least let’s me read when there’re no calls to be made. But all of that is really okay; Pirsig’s message of Quality and the nature of reality sort of help me accept that I’m doing this work because it will pay me to keep moving forward towards work with much higher value. And unfortunately I do feel competent enough in my own critical thinking that I find myself, yet again, working to integrate Pirsig’s ideas into everything else I know about philosophy, consciousness and the ultimate apprehension of reality. My own experience. There’s just so much to reconcile here; our personal experiences are so profoundly unique and yet, if we want to believe they are integrated into some sort of overarching, all-encompassing reality we have to try to reconcile the discrepancies between everything we’ve been taught to think and feel, and everything we DO think and feel. There’s many a slip betwixt the cup and lip.

Maybe I’m getting a bit deep here, but for myself, this is what I value most about putting these thoughts out there for whoever cares to read them. I really enjoy reading the blogs of my new-found friends and we all seem to keep it a bit on the lighter side, sort-of cheering each other along on our way, but I can’t help getting deeply reflective when I read works like ZMM. I know if folks don’t care to read or comment on these musings, it’s okay. Somehow, it just feels a bit better to think out loud about it.