Looper

Have you ever noticed how when you go on an exciting ride it just takes you back to where you started?

You’ll want to ride it again because it was so exhilarating and so you'll stay in your seat until it begins once more. It flings you about so the wind rushes through your hair. Your hands and feet dangle freely from a terrifying height and the abyss beneath you waits to swallow you up at any moment. The fear of falling into this abyss heightens the excitement of the ride even though deep down you know it’s only an illusion, in reality you’re actually safely fastened to your seat. Perhaps knowingly, you simply tend to forget from time to time.

From this height you look down on all the people who aren’t living it up at that very moment like you are. And just by simply looking at them walk around, with their slow pace and lack of adventurousness your excitement lessens and so you look away slightly repulsed.
“There’s nothing better than this”, you think, and you’re totally right. Everything else in your life has paled in comparison to the amount of joy and ecstasy you’re feeling right now so why on Earth would you leave it? As long as you can’t answer this question you’ll choose to stay on the ride for many more cycles.

After a while, there will be something about the ride’s repetitiveness that begins to gnaw at you. First, without your conscious knowing, your eyes start to wander. After all it’s such dizzying scenery you’ve seen so many times before. Next you’ll feel slightly bored and something that’s somewhere between a thought and a feeling urges you to get off and try something else. Here is where you can go one of two ways. You’ll either fight the urge by using words to argue away the boredom, “you’re not actually bored. Everyone feels like a change once in a while and it’s your turn to feel it now. That’s all. This’ll pass”. And if this is your route either you’ll continue to go around until the feeling of boredom makes itself so powerfully known that no amount of logic or persuasion can override it, or, more unfortunately, your energy levels deplete from the ongoing internal struggle and you simply stop feeling anything at all and don’t know if you’re excited or bored as you watch the world go by.

The more courageous and efficient route is to immediately accept the legitimacy of your feeling and to do everything in your power to alleviate it. This, of course, means patiently waiting for the ride to come yet again to a momentary stop and jumping off without looking back as soon as you get the chance. For if you miss that chance, how do you know you would jump at the next one?

So now you’ve hopped out of your seat and go searching for the real adventure and excitement. With a self-awareness you haven’t experienced before, you look up at the children who are still being flung about at dizzying speeds and realise the naivety of your previous judgements. Ashamed of your past thoughts but considering yourself above them, you now walk off with a newfound confidence and maturity, meeting others along the way who have also descended from the ride to go off in search of a new high.

You don’t have to journey too far before you piece everything together and realise you’re actually in a highly sophisticated amusement park called ‘ParkLand’. Speaking to more and more ‘descended’ ones, you also learn the park itself wouldn’t be possible without a group of people called ‘engineers’ who have ensured the structural integrity of all the rides in the entire complex.

You’re so deeply impressed that this group of people who have no direct link to you whatsoever have sacrificed time with loved ones, energy and health just in order to maintain your safety. You announce to your newfound friends that you will dedicate yourself to engineering so as to pay the world back for what you were so lucky enough to receive, the dizzying thrills of your childhood.

However, it’s not long after this admiration for engineers that you begin to understand the park relies on others’ sacrifices too. In fact, simply to touch upon a sizeable chunk of every profession out there all you need to do is think about one aspect of the park, the raw materials. Moving beyond what you’ve learned in engineering, you begin to mull what type of transport those raw materials would require. From here you can’t help but think about the design and engineering of those transport vehicles, the coding undergirding their automation, the business minds even needed for the launch and success of the freight company, the supply chain and logistics work that ensures the operation of the company, the designer of the company logo etc. etc. The more you think about everything that constitutes the park the more you realise what countless number of industries and experts are involved with even the blue ink, for the ‘P’ on an official and heavily crumpled Parkland serviette that you happen to find in your old suitcase now forty years later. With great reluctance you’re being seconded from San Fran to Copenhagen as one of the engineers to oversee the construction of a Bjark Ingels apartment complex. Ten years ago this would have excited you like nothing else, Denmark is an architects and engineers dream! But ten years ago you lived out you dream of making the move from Sydney to San Fran with your four-year-old daughter and fox of a husband. And three years before that you flew from Singapore to Sydney as a young and ambitious architect with an exciting and noble responsibility of repaying the world for the safety and thrills of your youth. Your now petulant fourteen-year-old daughter is calling out your name because she can’t find her gloves and though you would normally answer a strange but familiar silence descends upon you. You’ve fully unfurled the Parkland serviette made silky smooth by the million crinkles and folds it’s been subjected to and can read the amusement park’s full title. You’ve seen this logo myriad times but for some reason this time you now look past the words and focus on the cartoonish depiction of a ride that serves as the backdrop. It’s a ride that clearly spins quickly with children excitedly clinging for dear life to freely swinging seats and the ride you remember going on repeatedly when you were a child. Why did I ever get off, you think. And then you can’t help but lament the irretrievableness of your naïve but simple and happy childhood. You quickly start to strategize about ways to make your now somewhat monotonous adult life more exciting and childlike but give up just as fast. And after you’ve howled at yourself, at your lofty ambitions to give back to the world, at your sanctimonious maturity and efforts to seek out truer and more meaningful pleasures in life you finally stop, forgive yourself and sit there in silence because there’s no more anger to direct at yourself, no more tears to cry, no more frustration. It’s then that you realise you’ve simply come round full circle on your current ride and the thought of repeating it once again, while you know it will be satisfying and well-respected, will not give you what you’re really seeking now. To get off the current ride you find yourself on, to quietly walk away, without arrogance this time, and to find those who have done the same.

and now you're left in a serious predicament. If you stay on the ride you'll go in circles. If you continually fall off the ride for the thrill of the unknown only to hop back on again once that new place is known you're also going in circles. So what are you meant to do? Enjoy the spinning till boredom, enjoy the falling too. But on the last fall walk away to free yourself from the ride itself and have look back at the circles you were once so happy to be stuck in. With this newfound freedom drive somewhere exotic with the top down listening to Outkast and eat some of that slightly sweet and a little bit savoury popcorn that is fucking incredible. I mean really go for it baby! But it's here where the ultimate and most humbling of tricks is played. When the popcorn now tastes more savoury than sweet. Because you realise that living to the max and experiencing all the freedom you could ever want becomes another loop. And from this moment out you know that you're never actually 'free' but progressively caught in loops that while currently enveloping you are beyond your level of awareness. Believe me, this discovery is both hilarious and depressing, Jesus Christ. Like, it's in a similar but not precisely the exact same vein to why Donnie is laughing so hard when the airplane engine is falling through the sky on the way to crushing him to oblivion. That hysterical laugh at the end of movies when the protagonist learns they're stuck in a inescapable Oedipal grip of fate. What they don't show at the end of those movies though is what happens after the characters can laugh no longer. And don't worry it's not sad or depressing at all! What happens then is an all pervasive peace because as the character truly and to his absolute core accepts and embraces the sheer inescapableness of the now obvious loops in his past and the maddeningly subtle loops of his present and future, he realises that in accepting his complete lack of freedom his is now is completely free as he no longer seeks freedom, no longer struggles with the fact of and no longer tries to escape his loops, and is able to live and love completely because he is always just a lost soul swimming in a fish bowl year after year.