Life sometimes is like a puzzle. Not some really complicated metaphorical puzzle, but like really simple ages 8 and up puzzle. It’s probably only like 250-500 pieces. Beyond being simple, you really have your whole life to put together and maintain this puzzle.

These pieces are made up of several things: Circumstance, friendships, relationships, behaviors, career, luck. These are all the individual pieces of the puzzle.

A lot of people are born without certain pieces of this puzzle. That makes it very hard for them to put the whole puzzle together and create the final picture. That isn’t to say it’s impossible; it just takes a lot more effort and work and tenacity for them to put the puzzle together. Sometimes they can basically complete the puzzle without those pieces and sometimes they are able to forge new pieces on their own.

Occasionally, unfortunately, over the course of your life, you will have a piece of the puzzle stolen from you. It’s really unfair, but it happens. Other times, you lose the piece yourself. When you lose it yourself, at least you know it’s there, hiding under the couch cushion or tucked away under a pile of magazines. Most likely it’s under the fridge. At least at that point you know its somewhere within your reach. It’s much easier to produce knowing that you have seen that piece before and that it must be somewhere in your house than it is to try to build it from scratch.

I think that once the puzzle is put together, it’s easier to maintain. It creates this somewhat stable square that you can mount on the wall and maintain for a very long time. That isn’t to say that at any point a piece will be stolen from you unfairly, because that’s just part of the cruelty of chance, but for the most part you know your puzzle is all together. Sometimes a keystone of your puzzle will be taken and the continuity of the overall picture will disappear, and that is truly unfair, but it is possible to recover from, generally.

Most people will have pieces of their puzzle taken from them or will be born without all of the ingredients. That is unfair and challenging for those people. What is really depressing is knowing that all of your pieces are in your hand, maybe a piece or two is lost between the couch cushions, but that you just can’t find the stamina to get off your ass, find that piece, and even begin to put all of the pieces together. It’s so rare to be dealt such a good hand, and such a shame to let it go to waste.

This morning I had this thought. I believe it was based on some research that I read but I just can’t remember. While I was thinking about it, I thought that it would make a pretty good Juice post.

When we write or reflect on our thoughts and our consciences’ they seem very epic and storylined. We believe that everyone behaves the way they behave and act on impulses based on some lifelong story arc. I believe that is the way that everyone sees themselves and one another. It is probably drawn from some average that naturally can be derived from a series of experiences that all individuals share. We end up drawing caricatures of ourselves and each other.

In these stories and in the way we treat ourselves, we experience a larger story arc that we feel is inescapable. The villain will always be the villain, the hero will always be the hero, I will always be a guy that skirts the middle ground, and so will you.

In this sense, our lives and interactions end up being defined by who we were born to be.

So this post that I read somewhere (that I can’t link unfortunately), it read said that we are merely a consciousness reborn from our most recent few minutes or seconds. That the person we are is drivin by each fleeting distraction and impulse and zoned-out experience. They described that we only truly live, chemically and biologically for a few seconds to a minute and that all the decisions we make are based on the information we are given for those 45 or so seconds and then we are vanished. Replaced by a new, reborn thought.

I want you to deeply consider this concept. It may sound farfetched, but imagine for a moment that each individual thought that you have is handed a deck of experience. Experience from the amount of time since you were born, but diluted. You can handle this deck in any way you want for 45 to 360 seconds. Imagine now that once done reading this post is over, that a new consciousness will come into play. We act and behave and daydream in sequences of 45 – 360 seconds.

We program, we work, we relax, we indulge, we decide, we behave on this increment of time.

We all dream in periods of time similar to this. Fleeting moments of random encounters and strange, revealing personal behaviors. The only thing that separates our dreams from ourselves is a long term memory and the physics of reality.

So I imagine that our individual consciousness is much closer to our dreams than we expect. I don’t mean to downplay personality disorders that we want to escape at all. In fact, I believe this model supports most of them. I imagine that someone with a pre-disposition to addictive behaviors, every three or so minutes, that may have had cigarettes lately, is given a hand of cards that says “Okay, lets not smoke this round.” A few minutes later, a new sense of being is told “Well, we wanted to smoke, but we didn’t, what are you going to do?”

Eventually, we reach a tipping point where each previous consciousness is essentially peer-pressured into acting on the impulses of the prior generation.

It is up to the current controller to decide how to handle the stress of each given situation. Or not. It depends on the nature and nuture, or “deck”, that we are handed.

Cigarettes and other addictions are a very relatable and simple example of pretty much all behaviors, from drug addiction to eating to the way we treat others. I only list it as a behavior that most people can associate with. I encourage everyone to consider their behaviors against this concept.

Anyways, just something I thought about today.

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader who realized his family’s dream of turning his starving country into a minor nuclear-weapons power even as the isolated nation sank further into despotism, died on Saturday of a heart attack, according to the country’s state-run media.

[h/t] New York Times

Nuclear arms and extreme nationalism aside, it’s fair to say he was a crazy, crazy man.  From Wikipedia:

Kim was said to be a huge film fan, owning a collection of more than 20,000 video tapes and DVDs.^[111] His reported favorite movie franchises included Friday the 13th, Rambo, Godzilla, and Hong Kong action cinema,^[112] and any movie starring Elizabeth Taylor.^[113] He was the author of the book On the Art of the Cinema. In 1978, on Kim’s orders, South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee were kidnapped in order to build a North Korean film industry.^[114]

…

Also an apparent golfer, North Korean state media reports that Kim routinely shot three or four holes-in-one per round.^[119] His official biography also claims that Kim composed six operas and enjoys staging elaborate musicals.^[120] Kim also referred to himself as an Internet expert.^[121]