We Are All Rhizomes.

8th June, 2020.
Tea-addicted.
Raining.

Again, if you're not going to read this till the end, just scram. Arjouk.

Don't read this italicized paragraph. It's just me complaining again.

This week has been spectacularly committed to testing my patience. My hard drive cable decided to retire without notice. Every professor simultaneously remembered that assignments exist. My contingency plan of borrowing a friend's laptop collapsed after he baptised its keyboard with a cup of hot coffee. Add the usual parade of miserable headlines and you've got yourself a rather uninspiring week.

Oddly enough, I didn't react.

Not because I've become wise overnight, but because I've grown tired of negotiating with inconveniences that have already made up their minds.

We are all Contradictions.

I've spent the last few years disagreeing with myself more than I've disagreed with anyone else. Opinions I once defended with theatrical confidence now make me raise an eyebrow. Ideas I dismissed have quietly found their way back into my thinking. At first, I thought this inconsistency was a flaw. Now I suspect it's simply what thinking looks like.

We're oddly obsessed with coherence, as though changing your mind were a moral failure. It isn't. If anything, refusing to change your mind is far more suspicious. Every conviction is merely today's draft. Tomorrow may edit it beyond recognition. We spend so much time chasing certainty that we forget uncertainty is usually where the interesting conversations begin.

Chew on This.

During my first year at university, I was convinced by antinatalism. I had been reading far too much Baudrillard and had developed the charming habit of believing reality was little more than an elaborate practical joke. My argument was simple: why invite another human being into a world so spectacularly capable of disappointment?

A couple of years later I found myself having almost the same conversation with another friend. Strangely enough, they both wore the same kind of glasses. Perhaps philosophy requires a particular frame.

This time I argued the opposite.

Not because I had become optimistic, but because I'd stumbled upon Hannah Arendt. One of her most beautiful ideas is natality: every birth introduces something genuinely new into the world. Not merely another person, but another possibility. That thought lingered with me. We inherit a world we never asked for, certainly, but we also inherit the ability to interrupt it. History, for all its dreadful habits, occasionally makes room for surprises.

Perhaps that's enough.

We are all Rhizomes.

That brings me to one of my favourite metaphors: Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome. Unlike a tree, which politely grows upward from a single trunk, a rhizome wanders. It spreads underground, changes direction without asking permission, branches unexpectedly, disappears, then reappears somewhere you weren't looking.

I've always thought people resemble rhizomes more than trees.

We imagine our lives as straight lines because they're easier to draw. In reality they're detours, abandoned convictions, accidental friendships, books picked up by chance, conversations that quietly alter the course of an ordinary Tuesday. Even our beliefs refuse to stay put. They branch. They contradict themselves. Sometimes they abandon their own roots entirely.

Looking back at old journals is proof enough. Half the opinions feel embarrassingly confident. The other half sound like they were written by someone I'd quite like to meet again.

So here's the point.

It's perfectly acceptable to outgrow yourself.

To cringe at something you wrote three years ago.

To revisit an old video and think, what on earth was I doing?

To discover that your favourite philosopher no longer sounds quite so convincing.

Growth has dreadful public relations. People mistake it for inconsistency when, more often than not, it's evidence that you're still paying attention.

Perhaps that's why I've always admired postmodernism, despite its reputation for making everyone's head hurt. At its best, it recognises that certainty has a habit of collapsing under its own weight. Derrida wasn't interesting because he claimed to possess the answers. He was interesting because he reminded us that even texts occasionally argue with themselves.

Why should we be any different?

We're contradictions.

Fortunately.

Because contradictions mean movement, and movement means there's still another version of you quietly making its way through the soil.

Also, Miley Cyrus is criminally underrated.

Don't @ me.

I'll probably read this tomorrow and find at least six things I'd cringe over.

Which, I suppose, proves the point.