Nocturnal Minds

There are people who wake up at  two in the early hours of the morning to answer e-mails like some teachers of mine. I simply cannot fathom the idea of waking up so early to do something so mundane.

What I can and often do fathom is the fact that some people wake up in the middle of the night to rummage around the mind. I plead guilty! I wake up to systematically search the air for unusual sounds, and when I decide that everything is clear, aside from my fish tank’s noisy filter, I proceed to play my mind like a broken record. As a nocturnal thinker, I search for nothing in particular, but I often find something worth my nocturnal time.  I try to look into the people that filled the hours of my day. I try to imagine why they did some of the things they did. For instance, if someone talks to me, I try to imagine why in the most vivid way. I try to get into their mind and decipher their thoughts. Its fascinating! I do this until sleep finds me again.

I began to think last night, during my nocturnal stroll in within mind, about something very peculiar. People can be truly interesting beings; infinitely unique. We are the most complex organism on this planet, in the Universe for all we know. We form worldwide communication networks, and we have such an impact on this planet, that we may even destroy it.  How is it that we take our lives for granted? How is it that we manage to kill each other and look down upon others? We, as the most intelligent beings in this planet should have learned long ago to take care of our own, for we must fight for the long term survival of our species. Instead we fight among ourselves to fulfill  selfish needs.

I wonder if it is in our nature to be belligerent and selfish, perhaps those traits helped us win the evolutionary battle. Now that we’re at the top, we must take care not lose control over ourselves, over our own nature. It begins by undermining our brothers and sisters and ends in bombing a nation. Perhaps our own nature will be the end of us.

I’m amazed at how much thinking one can do during a lonely sleepless night. Perhaps my nocturnal mind is the result of guilt gifted to us by our ancestors.