Part Four
This brings me back to my earlier comment about my opinion that other witches seek power. I would very much like to make a strange distinction between power and control in this section. However, I’m not certain of how clear it will come across. Maybe the best way would be to compare to a computer: the graphics card decides how visually intense a game it can handle but the keyboard decides how refined the input will be received. Power in this case is the graphics card. What I want magic for is the control. This discovery of myself is rather new. I hadn’t put the pieces together of how I often feel out of place in these physics, and how my fear of others paying me too much attention were both borne from a sense that I lacked some sort of control that always felt possible yet also so annoyingly out of reach. I lack it, and I certainly want it.
To have control in this manner would mean feeling safe at my deepest core. It would mean that I didn’t need to feel like I was breaking yet another universe with my mere existence. A bit big-headed of myself to think I alone have the power to fuck up the whole cosmos, I know. I didn’t say I believed this, just felt it, which I think more concerningly reveals the depths of my unfounded shame. Either way, power is often coveted for the desire to make an impact. I want control so I can minimize mine own.
And yet I again want contradicting things. I want to do my best to live this life because I don’t want to have to live another one. I want to partake in some amount of hedonism. I wanted to move the friend that prompted this paper. I might still want to move him, although certainly to a lesser degree. No need to topple a wall that provides pleasant shade. Perhaps only make a dent to lean upon it more comfortably.
We need not go far for our next topic. To some it might be obvious that I shouldn’t be making this paper. I shouldn’t be entertaining the thought of speaking to a friend I tried to leave behind once. I know much of the shitty things he’s been involved in, and I’m not exactly delighted to have footed the bill for some of it. Literally. I suppose the term ‘should’ is shorthand for what society, or some external force, wants individuals to do for the interest of said society or external force. Maintaining the radio silence certainly favors my loved ones, and even some old friends I don’t know whether I consider friends anymore. In theory something that ‘should’ be done is supposed to be best for the actor as well. Except this silence only seems to assist part of me, particularly the part that is keen to maintain the happiness of those around me. But am I happy with this configuration? Is he happy? Are wants and shoulds really the apparatuses through which we, individuals, are going to find happiness? Only moments ago I mentioned the bond between wants and survival, so is being alive what it means to be happy? Do we only want things because something about those things are implied to provide us pleasure or safety? Hedonists seem to think the point of living is to seek pleasure. While I find no personal qualms with this statement I know many a person that misinterprets this very philosophical type of pleasure for its more basic day-to-day form. Even in the study of hedonism there is a strange push for actions and lifestyles that should be followed to get the most out of this higher meaning, the things one should consider when following this side of the coin to enlightenment.
Then again, hedonism doesn’t rule out living a more basic life either. We are all merely organic material anyway, trying our best to navigate through the input provided to us, so is it really so bad to follow the trail of delights our whole life through? ‘Should’ loses its blind power in this school of philosophy. Lower hedonism strips out the existence of shoulds entirely from the table of decision; higher hedonism admits the existence of shoulds, but also introduces the power in the individual to take and leave them as we please.
The Quiet Mirror 
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