this thought, not yet completed, for this situation, not yet resolved:

they say memories associated with certain smells are the strongest of all, easily brought back and vividly visceral as the recollection commences. a week or two ago, i picked up the scent of whatever perfume jessie wears and suddenly felt like the conditions outside were immaterial-- it was last spring again. claire seems to have been keeping track of me and a week ago she told me i was much happier back then. i suppose that's true. everything was less complicated. the list i ended up making in rambling paragraph form as my spring memories spilled out is almost uniformly positive and beautiful. i didn't know as many people and my world was smaller. well, smaller than it is now, but bigger than it had ever been at the time.

i flew right back mentally to avi's class and ethics right afterward in the morning, having a huge surplus of dining dollars and always stopping for green tea before class. i walked through mornings of increasingly good weather as those few months passed by, reading books with aesthetically pleasing covers and philosophically interesting content. i passed notes in philosophy class, drew circles on a board to make a point about violent video games, argued about literature (and the structure of the atmosphere), and gave a speech on the motif of harmful sensation. read beautiful losers right as spring break started. if the mornings were getting nicer the blooming day of later morning seemed more and more brimming with possibility. the new world. zen shorts. the rains and flowers right near the end...so much more. i have it all written down. i've been going back and adding more when i think of it.

so how influenced was i by all of this scheduled simplicity and taken-for-granted beauty of a season? or by anything else. not that i know how, or that i was even consciously forming that thought in those words, but this is what happened yesterday:

becky called me in the midst of a crisis. she wanted to know if i believe everything happens for a reason. we circled the question in little arcs of darwinism, nature vs. nurture, faith, existentialism, and the realisation of what we can never know. that's actually where we ended: with the idea of fate and free will, whether either exists and how there's no way to know. the best solution would be to just pick whatever way of looking at it gives you the greatest peace of mind and worry about something with more direct influence on your life. if thinking there's no such thing as free will makes you feel artificial and puppet-like, your "choices" actually predetermined by all that has come before (and it had to happen that way), then don't. lie to yourself if it's not really what you believe, and that's all it is-- a belief. i'm not overly concerned with that, but i'd really like to know what brought me to where i am now.

so whatever conception of what i really wanted in life that i had up to this point is only what it is because of what has already happened. that means something (or someone) new could shake it, and maybe it really has been shaken this time. i should be happier than i am right now, and anything could be responsible. the spring. or the summer. or a night last week. a chance encounter. a single conversation or a series of events that, when put together, form a complete picture. a combination of all these things and more. a life up to this point. now, the present, is all that really exists, and i don't know what to do with it.