What Am I Doing Here Anyway?

 

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I saw this post today and literally had this thought yesterday at Whole Foods while looking for my particular brand of favorite pads. 

The thought,

How annoying it is that my consciousness has this moving body that needs tedious things. 

I thought this while on the escalator because the escalator was slow and it just exaggerated how boring and tedious it is to move this body around errands, to worry about periods and bodily functions.

And then I thought,

How completely, utterly, bizarre a thought for a human being!

It took me some time to recover from it, this weird limbo-like reality where my consciousness could exist separately from my body. For however brief those moments are, my body is left behind, and my mind reigns in some atmospheric space. 

While in this headspace (pun intended), I often times refer to my body as "real estate," 

Take care of your body, it's the most valuable piece of real estate you'll ever own.

I imagine the following scene: telling the above to my 8-year-old niece, then watching her mind be blown as she realizes that her selfhood cannot be uploaded to a cloud like everything else. That our awareness of our existence (as we know it) ceases to exist without the heavy sack of stuff that carries our head (the supposed ground zero of our consciousness) around. 

In a world where ideas can be downloaded, uploaded, backed up, digitized... this is truly a desperate realization: the somewhat unremarkable borders of your consciousness due to your physical self.