When you stop caring for something you thought as important,
usually nothing of consequence happens at all. Take for example the
preservation of wildlife. Hawksbill turtles and rockhopper penguins never need
anybody puncturing their bodies and putting electronic tags in order to
survive. They’d do just fine being left alone. If for example those wacky penguins do go
extinct, it becomes a matter of complete irrelevance if I do not know, or I
stopped caring.
It
goes like this; if something does not exist inside our consciousness, they don’t
matter at all. If the whole of humanity never ever discovered rockhopper
penguins flailing about and throwing themselves off cliffs like bloody idiots,
do they ever exist at all? I’m bad at explaining things.
Have
you heard of this? If a branch falls of in a forest , hitting a fat squirrel
and killing it in the process, and nobody ever saw it or heard it, did the
branch ever fall in the first place? What the hell am I saying. Of course it
did, because I said so. It exists in my imagination, in my vision. The fat
squirrel really died, unfortunately. In the case which nobody ever narrates the
story of the heavy branch and the fat squirrel, did the incident ever happen at
all?
What I
am saying is that something needs to exist in your consciousness for it to
matter. If it doesn’t, then it does not matter
if it actually exist or not. This conjecture, of course, speaks about
the standpoint of human beings. It does not take into account of squirrels,
trees or suicidal penguins at all.
When you fall in love , the subject of such
intense feeling occupies a huge part of your consciousness. Even when you wish
to write something about daredevil penguins , they got pushed away into the
void and you start writing about love instead. Imagine a person’s consciousness
as a huge house with a lot of rooms; but there is only one person living in
that enormous place; the person himself. As with the case of any normal human
beings, when you live in a house, you’d pick one room and live there (if you
actually have the choice). You make that room yours, put your stuff in it, and stay
in it a lot of time. Then there are places you would frequent; the kitchen, the
living room, the toilet, or say, the library.
But there are all those other hundreds of room in your house, but you
won’t go there much because nothing really interests you, or you have no reason
to visit them. Such is a person’s consciousness; it’s a skulking mansion with
hundreds of millions of rooms. Things that
matter to you sit in your favourite room; on your table or hung on the
wall. Weird penguins probably sit in room number 200000, together with elephant
seals and sperm whales. If you love them
enough penguins might creep under your bed.
When you stop caring about something or forget them, they either get
sent into the most obscure , hidden rooms, or kicked out of the house. They don’t
matter anymore. Nor is there any reason
that you forgetting them would bring any terrible or significant consequences. Like
I said before, the poor penguins would just continue living as before. There
are exceptions, of course, like forgetting to turn off the oven or starving hamsters
in cages; those practical things.
There
are a few problems regarding one’s consciousness taking the shape of a huge
house with many rooms. First, you have little to no control to whatever comes
inside and stays inside. Here’s a clichéd line; in this capitalist society, you
see enough of an advertisement , and a brand stays plastered in your mind. Coca
Cola and Colgate are plastered forever on the walls of your house. And penguins
too, if you listen enough of David Attenborough. It’s not easy to remove them
either. You have to demolish the house; have an amnesia or something or simply
not think of them. But then trying to
forget, ironically, makes you remember them more.
Secondly , you have no idea what others’ consciousness looks like. Not
the slightest idea what their inner house looks like, what colour is it, how
many rooms they have. Most of all you don’t know what’s inside; what is it that
he put in his favourite room, or in the living room where he spends most of his
days. There can be 10 meter tall emperor penguins with crocodile tails who wear sunglasses for all
you know.
Therefore
a person has no way of finding out what does a person care for, what are his
true passions , who does he loves the most. You have no way of saying that a
person does not care for another, or that he has kicked you out of his
consciousness. Why do we always jump the gun and accuse someone of not caring
and forgetting stuff? Perhaps there are too many things in his room that it
gets too crowded and he can’t focus on each one all the time? We only have so
many eyes and ears, oh lord.
All you need is
ask.
Also,
if you decide to break away from someone because you thought he doesn’t care,
that does not imply that you would be removed from his most important room. At
the end it’s a man’s decision whether to keep you inside his mind or not. You
have no power over that. You also have no power to prevent him trying to make
amends and bring you back in reality, not merely in the rooms of his mind.
Of
course I made all this up. That does not mean that it’s untrue. This
writing will stay here, and still exist, even if you refuse to read or believe
in it, because I wrote it, and I do care.
