FlutterWonder

It's a very old song, now - one that everyone is familiar with. Thing is, though, I tend to avoid remixes for some reason - for some reason I just don't like the idea - but at any rate, only tonight I've come across this. I've heard it once or twice before from someone else's device, but really listened to it for the first time.

Had to say, first I listened to this:

And got thinking deep - when Rainbow set off that Rain-nuke, I had this odd realization that every person in the Manhatten project was a person just as much as Rainbow Dash or anyone else is. Everyone who does anything is just a person doing things - from yourself, to your friend, to your friend that joins the air force and does... crazy things while he's away, to the guards of a tyrant, to the tyrant himself, to the engineers that develop nuclear weapons, to every soldier on every side and even to terrorists and criminals - they're all just people... Doing things.

Then I listened to FlutterWonder and had a bit of a train of thought I wanted to write somewhere. Maybe it's just 3 am-posting, but I kinda liked it, so I'll drop it here in the off chance someone actually reads it, I can't help but wonder what they'll think, or if they'll catch on to the sort of odd, transcendent feeling I'm having.

This is nothing more than a record of what I see. Not what I want, what I believe, or what I expect.

The world is a big place, with lots of hidden corners full of things that you will not know unless you go there. It's quite overwhelming just the sheer scale of it – how many people there are – and then to realize that every on of them have their own lives, motivations, thoughts, histories, beliefs borne of their experience and what they've been told.

Perhaps the greatest realization is that human experience is, well, universal. I don't know what it's like to live in China, but I do know and experience the same things Chinese people do – desperate hope for a future, anxiety at the future's unknowns, a desire for greater things, a longing for peace and comfort, or conversely, a longing for the security and purpose that power promises.

As infinitely diverse and complex as it is, all of human experience can be reduced down to basic components that even a baby can understand – joy, hope, fear, loneliness, love – the whole range of human emotion. But, there are things a baby cannot comprehend – the hollow feeling of a departed loved one, or the thrill of accomplishing a herculean task you did not believe was possible, but that you accomplished after much, long concerted effort, nonetheless.

It is sad that humans do not recognize just how much we all have in common – that even the oddest and most inexplicable, even the most diabolical and angelic of actions are all done with motives that we would understand – for lust, impulse, fury, love, or the transcendent thrill of having made the world a better place.

Most things are done for practical reasons – to avoid something we fear, to get something we want – our desire fueled by a few basic desires that all humans know; feelings of comfort, peace and affection, or the satiation of hungers, and upon finding a thing that satisfies some of those base desires, a new hunger is made – if we find something has made us feel comfortable, we will seek that thing again in the future to satiate a newly born hunger.