Anxiety and Documentation

Today was like most days, the sun came out, the wind blew across the tall field grass like a grooming comb, and everything made sense or kept to its order. That was at least until I stepped outside to follow my own daily routine. Disruption after disruption followed and all that I could think about how I was the cause, no wait, the outcome of my many mistakes. How could I begin to forge a path for myself when the chaos left behind me was so damaging to so many? Why was I unable to write? There is perhaps nothing more desirable that I have felt in the last few years than the urge to write. This is no desire isolated to myself but rather it is a compulsion outside nuance of an “I” that must grapple with the trust of understanding, to contribute in some way to a specific area of knowledge. But so far I have done nothing and even more have wasted the time of my professors and colleges.

I am brought here today to consider what Emmanuel Kant wrote about ethics and yet I cannot draw myself to write it down. I am unsure whether what I say is right or whether I am simply fooling myself. There seems to be no lack of ideas, for when I speak they seem to flow out abundantly but there is something about the documentation of those thoughts that worries me. What enormous consequence is contained within a document, it is sentenced forever to reproduce itself again and again, the resonance of history eternally present. And yet, here I am, documenting, nonetheless playing a role in the creation of a perpetual past that can be rediscovered in its imperfections and idiosyncrasies.

What I then venture to say is only apart of that creation, but what is it exactly that is in the process, what state of mind such that it is reflective of a future that has yet to present itself - for what other reason does one have to document than to preserve for the future. What a being this must be who desires to document! What of the anxiety to do so? How can we account for this? Is it a being that knows all too well the consequence of documentation, which regards it with care or denies entry into the walls surrounding its present past? If only we could come to some conclusions about this being that is fearful of documentation and have it recognize the possibilities of understanding that it opens up regardless of its ability to express it.