on being, just being

The week has nearly ended, already or again. Time flies, as they say and these last days and weeks have not been any different. Although I try to plan my tasks and to-do’s in detail and rather obsessively. First with hand drawn beautiful color blocks in my agenda and then digitally on my google calendar. This past weeks, I somehow did not find enough time to read, to think, to be. 

Cogito, ergo sum

The philosophical statement by René Descartes, was a steady companion. Usually translated into English as “I think, therefore I am”, these last few days I was clearly not, not fully at least.

Descartes’s statement is a fundamental element of Western philosophy. It provides a certain foundation for knowledge in the face of radical doubt. While other knowledge could be a figment of imagination, deception, or mistake, Descartes asserted that the very act of doubting one’s own existence served as proof of the reality of one’s own mind. If there is a thought, there must be an entity who thinks, isn’t there? Applying this paradigm to my last few days, the statement could be translated as follows: “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”, so I finally was, and fully so.

These are challenging times, not just because we are living in an umpteenth lockdown, not because I have not been allowed to have a healthy glass of wine on a terrace with my friends for too long now; These are challenging times because I have come to understand that this unknown, distant and foggy future of hybrid duality is the new old. I still doubt all of it, but at least I think and therefore I may be.

Just be.