Short Story: Inside the Philosopher’s Town

The trick for disappearing thoughts isn’t shushing. That is only to invite more ideas, the pestering kind, which will cause another agonizing loop over inadequacies and lack of will. The trick is to keep in motion, or so I have come to believe. The celebrated philosophers and brilliant talkers make us think knowledge should be sought in quiet rooms and inside the tomes, and that might be. But inner peace comes when this hand of mine flows upward, and I follow its path. Or I let my feet decide where they go, and when they connect to the ground and keep the laws of motion relevant, my mind is at peace again. Years, like everyone else, I sought after pure knowledge, the battle of ideas, and I created new formulas and made this city of ours bloom in complexity, but now I find the true connection in this flesh and in the sequences it can manifest. See a child or a cat, and they radiate joy when the ball swirls as they push it onward or when they cry, and you come. They know the true art of impact and appreciate the satisfaction you can get from altering the physical world’s state. Sound and form made out of atoms upon atoms react.

So now I walk and see the gravel roll and hear it rasp underneath the soles of my feet. I sense every pebble, and I’m more alive than in the past pursuing abstract achievements of recognition. I watch up and see the boards telling me how to feel and what to be. In the past, they solaced me—the sentence of the day, letting me have food for thought. I always found a new perspective to take. So do now those who have stopped to stare at the slogans. I hear them murmur their pondering, turning the plain into paradox and paradoxes into mundane. So much like I.

I nod and move on, letting my feet carry past the high rising buildings which define the logic of common sense. As a philosopher, I know it is my mind playing tricks on me, assessing weight, distance, and height with primitive capacities. Still, my trained eye pots that fold in the middle, twisting the building into a fluid sculpture, is entirely possible. I appreciate the wonder while I feel my heart sigh. Impossible and illogical, yet, so it does. I return to walking, having let my thoughts wander.

Clearly, I haven’t reached the point when exhaustion takes over, or I let my senses be permeated by all that my fellows have done. I yearn to get out of this city of ours, but I can’t. No one knows what is outside the glass dome. Not even those who sat watching the great beyond. Sometimes my walks take me there, to the border. But I don’t want to agonize myself, so I turn around and face once more the twisting houses and sentences of the day and avoid the best I can to end up in a perpetual debate.

Thank you for reading and be your day full of motion ❤

© K.A. Ashcomb