Searching for meaning

Been thinking a lot, about how I’m thinking much more now than I’ve ever remembered.

Some nights I’m lying in bed and a memory in primary school suddenly pops up in my head, and I start thinking about how I felt, what I did, what happened to the people around…

On other days I think about an event that’s yet to happen, mapping out the events, pictures unfolding in my mind, imagining how everything’s going to pan out.

When I’m at the supermarket shopping for groceries a completely unrelated and random thought comes up.

In essence, I’ve been thinking a lot. And I know it.

When I think back, I realised how I never thought beyond what I was doing, meaning to say whatever I did was merely on the surface. When I was listening to music, I just listened to drown out the noise. When I was reading a book, it was a race to get to the end. When I left the house, it was to get somewhere. Cause and effect. A cycle.

Perhaps it wasn’t that I never thought deeper. Perhaps I just realised that I do now.

We’re all like atoms bouncing off each other. Every person we meet, every experience we go through, inevitably influences and moulds us, affecting us in one way or another. We’re like mirrors of each other. We’re like patchwork, a little bit from each person we talk to, another bit from a story you heard, something from an article online, all pieced together.

I think from each of these experiences, we come to understand and learn something about others/ourselves. We search for meaning to school, to friends, to work, to family, to life. Now, whenever I listen to a song, I listen to the words, how they string together, what they mean, how the writer felt… I read a book and demand more of the characters, expressing grievances whenever the ending was less than satisfactory. Or try understanding why the author chose to end that way. When friends behave this way, I think about why they might do or say that…

Thinking, thinking, thinking.

It’s a lot of thinking to do.