Feeling Reality and Finding My Path

I wish there wasn’t so much cum on my keyboard. That should be a song. Cum On My Keyboard, by Toby Keith. Maybe I’ll write it and send it to him. Maybe I’ll write it and record it myself. Maybe I’ll become a Godfearing country artist who goes but the name “Cum Tree” and all of my albums will be produced by “Cunt Tree Records.” I’m off to a roaring start in this one folks. My parents must be so proud.

What’s new in my life, you ask? Tortoises. That’s what. I have a lot of tortoises now. Okay, that’s a lie. I don’t have any tortoises, but sometimes it feels like things are moving slowly. Then I look back and say “wow, time really flies doesn’t it!?” Time is weird. So is space. Isn’t it weird to exist and not die immediately? I think that’s pretty weird. What if we’re all simultaneously dead and alive at the same time? What if time doesn’t really exist and we are all just moving through a fixed state of energy on infinite planes of different realities? If this doesn’t make sense, you clearly aren’t doing enough drugs.

Anyways, back to my reality. Hi, how are you? I’m here. And so are you. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been trying to listen to my intuition more lately. I’m getting better at feeling. I’ve always been a thinker. I’m good at thinking, but living in your own head has its limitations. We’re probably all a little bit too into our own heads.

This might sound weird, but I’m actually addicted to thinking. I’ve only recently learned how to let my mind go and simply feel what it’s like to be. It has taken a lot of meditation, countless hours of yoga, weeks spent on the road alone, and a few mushroom trips to get there, but I’m getting there.

Most of my life I’ve been a thinking materialist, meaning I’ve been focused on my thoughts and the material, physical world around me. And that’s all well and dandy, but there’s something much more profound out there: the spiritual world of feeling and consciousness. We often focus on defining truth as what can be proved, but I think truth is what can be understood. Have you ever felt like someone wasn’t telling the truth? You couldn’t “prove” they were lying, but you knew they were. You understood you weren’t hearing the truth.

That’s why I struggle to listen to scientists talk about the nature of reality. Almost all of the discussion is based around what we can see and what we can prove. But our visual perception is so limited. What if the only way we can understand is to feel? The most profound moments I’ve had in my life have been those rare points in time where I was actually able to completely free myself from my own mind. They felt more real than anything I’ve ever been able to touch or see.

I’ve had a lot of crazy stuff happen lately. Undeniable synchronicities. Spiritual encounters. I won’t go into it right now but I will say I feel reborn. Things are making sense now. They were very confusing for a long time, but the more I free myself from my own mind the more I seem to understand. It seems like an oxymoron. Maybe I seem like a moron. Perhaps I’m more on some wacky shit. Okay now I’m just playing with words, which… well, I guess that’s what I came here to write about to begin with.

I think we’ve all got our own mark to make on this universe. I realize that mine has to do with words. The more I write, the more I organize poetry and jokes and raps, the more things line up smoothly in my reality. When I’m moving on the right path, I start to see ones everywhere. I look at the clock and it’s 11:11. I put my phone away and the next time I grab it, it’s 1:11. I order food and I’m order 111. This has been happening for quite some time, until a couple of days ago, when I started to see twos.

I looked at the clock and it was 2:22. I don’t really remember ever looking at the clock and noticing it being 2:22. Yesterday, for some reason I decided I wanted McDonalds French fries. I haven’t had them in years, and honestly have maybe only had McDonalds fries a handful of times in my life. It’s not something I do. I don’t know why I felt the urge to buy them. I place my order and the cashier hands me my receipt. My order number? 222. I wake up this morning and my lover sends me a picture of one of her crypto accounts. How much money was in it? $2,222. I don’t know what it means. All I know is a couple of days ago I felt a shift and now I’m seeing twos instead of ones.

Life is crazy. This post is crazy. This post probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to a lot of people, but maybe it will one day. It wouldn’t have even made sense to me a couple of years ago or even last year. I guess what I was trying to highlight is that when it feels like we are fighting against the flow of the universe, it might do us well to reconsider.

It’s like when you’re in a relationship that is constantly draining you, everything is a struggle, conversations don’t flow smoothly, but you’re fighting to make it work because you’re afraid of letting it fall apart. We’re afraid of the unknown. The problem is that the relationship has already fallen apart, and we won’t let it, because we listen to fear rather than our intuition. We stay with someone who clearly isn’t right for us because we are afraid. We’re afraid of being alone or of feeling heartbreak, but sometimes we have to feel the pain to feel the gain, ya dig homie?

The old sunk cost fallacy. It happens to people in their careers all the time. “But I’ve worked so hard to get to this point, I can’t quit now!” But you can. You can always start a new path. If it’s the right one, things might move more quickly than you could ever expect. A new life is always waiting around the corner, if you’ll have it.

Jason Brendel

Jason Brendel is an author, poet, and comedian living in Austin, Texas. Navigate the buttons below to follow him on social media, make a donation, or purchase his collection of laugh-out-loud poetry on Amazon.

Learn More

• Amazon
• Instagram
• Facebook