Envisioning a Future

I've been thinking that I really need to be a little more serious about writing. Now that several years have passed along and I have had a few years trying my hand at finding my own way in the world, I've discovered that, despite what I may have wanted in the past, what I thought would be the best course of success in life, success isn't going to be found in personal preferences and talent, but instead in improving myself to the point where, even if I don't wind up doing what I would like, I have become a decent person doing whatever I find myself doing in the future.

(It's a bit hard to explain just tapping it out quickly on a keyboard as the thoughts arrive. At points, it appears we live in an information age where the information we receive is incomplete, distorted, or plain wrong. Forgive what may seem like moralizing or solipsism, but working through these personal thoughts is sometimes messy even if I hope to one day transcend them.)

I worry about not being able to pull out from underneath the hidden assumptions that afflict us all. Nevertheless, despite the potential presence of my own assumptions, the people I see around me, according to my particular viewpoint in the world, seem to feel that future regrets are hidden in not achieving the material successes they incessantly desire. Hidden in failing to achieve a life of material comforts that do not extend beyond their too-myopic dreams. But again, to my point of view, most of those same people do not realize that the vision of material success to which they strive is so far out of reach that failure is an inevitability. We admire achievement and success when it happens, but we do not seem to recognize how rare those things are, or the kinds of troubles they will eventually bring. Instead, we burn in the fire of vague personal frustrations, treating each other poorly because our sense of who we are and what we feel we deserve has been distorted. It's as if our failure to build ourselves in a material image that has always been false is a tragic injustice, that the world has somehow wronged us for not providing us the false comforts of a rich and famous lifestyle.

Which is why it seems to me that life is about becoming a better person through trial and errors while struggling to avoid the overwhelming waves of ignorance, contention, and selfish thinking. And of course, it is not easy or pleasant to think about. But, as seems obvious, the happiness people seek in things, achievements, and worldly success is a mirage. Happiness itself is a virtue that is found in aligning oneself to the better qualities that make us all truly human. And in that sense, it can developed and practiced. I only hope that I can develop it as a professional athlete develops muscle so that I may use it confidently and unconsciously and feel, ultimately, all the better for doing so.

Transformations

Not sure how to describe an illness where the main symptom is a dissatisfaction with yourself so intense that it makes you feel ill and puts you slightly out of time with the Universe. Life continues to swirl around you with the same vibrancy and colors it always had, but instead of a warm and satisfying red, or an enjoyable rich blue with a calming coolness, everything is pasted over with a light pastel yellow that, like a sticky film, clings over everything you happen to glance upon.

There is something about my life that feels a bit unsatisfying, perhaps tinged with the portent of doom or trouble ahead, or an anxiety about the course of the future that will not lay flat, and I cannot shake it. I want to. People who I am close to say that is nothing more than common anxiety, or perhaps it is yet another flare up of a lifelong battle with the inane minor demons of depression, but no. It somehow seems more than that. More frightening.

I have been imploring the benevolent forces in the Universe to guide me to a transformative path, a path where I find the calming centers inside myself, the ones I have been seeking and fix my feet firm upon it to walk straight ahead into both joy and sorrow with an equanimity that has still somehow remained elusive. There is an honorable and dignified course of life that feel remains out of my grasp.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that I am always seeking the difficulties in life rather than allow myself to be human, to love myself with an impartiality that can acknowledge my failures without berating me for them. Love, not the weird definitions of it that exist in my current culture, seems to be the only proper way to motivate myself to good course in life. Too much sorrow leads to either despondency, or a defeated resignation that permits failures as just another one of life's "horrible" inevitabilities. I need to be able to feel the sorrows, to forgive myself for the pain they cause, and trust that I can endure without succumbing to the worst of them. If I can somehow cultivate the habit of joy, then I will be fortified against the onslaught of sorrows.

Habit, now there is an interesting word. Since the mundane chores and duties of life must be dispatched along with the goal of self-improvement, the best way to handle them is develop good habits. I've wasted too much time thinking that overcoming pain or sorrow or improving myself was an intellectual exercise of the mind more than a life practice that requires regularity in its execution. One of the lessons of the world is, obviously, this: if one wishes to become good at something, one has to practice. Personal transformation of one's inner life can, it seems to me, be encouraged through good habits which help you practice being a decent, good person on a regular basis. As such, the first habit that I need to develop is "discipline." Discipline, as a virtue, is, it appears to me, nothing more than an expression of "Faithfulness." You must be faithful to yourself, your obligations, your spirit, and the larger world around you. Motivation follows practice. Heat produces motion, stillness freezes us in place. This is one of my first tasks in the process of transforming my life: encouraging and practicing the habits of a good character, to becoming a devoted person, morally upright, and always prepared to do the right thing no matter how hard it might first appear to do so.

I think that I am going to have to write more. The only problem that I seem to encounter is that I often do not know what to write about. I think I would like to try to discuss something that is meaningful to me, and I would hope, helps bring meaning into the world. This is not to say that I am some kind of egotist that is seeking to inflict my particular view of knowledge on the world, but rather I am trying to share something with the world that lends itself to a meaning and positive influence for the world itself. I would hope that doing so would help me feel like I have accomplished something good in the world, but I also know (in the depths of my heart) that offering up something that I believe to be good to the world may be personally more difficult for me in the long run. I know that I am being vague about all of this. I apologize. Even if I provided some specificity about what I was talking about, it would still be difficult to express this idea.

It's just . . . it may be that I feel that I have reached an age where some opportunities are closed to me, possibly for the rest of my life. There is a finality to some of these recognitions that is slightly unsettling, a new freedom that it more disturbing than emancipating. Simultaneously, I am also beginning to see that there is still some chance to achieve something that would help the world achieve a greater good. If I can somehow grapple with all these impulses to try and 'do better' or 'be better,' maybe I can achieve my goal. The thought hidden right there in that former statement perhaps expresses my feelings more than any other: "my goals are shifting." No longer do I feel that I can grasp some material life of comfort that always seems just out of reach anyway, a media chimaera designed to ensnare foolishly immature hearts and minds. Yes, even now, I would like to have certain unfulfilled elements of my life fulfilled, but I recognize that this may not ever happen. Therefore, I must refocus my life and change my goals in such a way where I find personal meaning by attaching myself to something bigger and more important than an indolent life comfortably lived for myself and my desires alone.

I feel that I am a reasonably intelligent person who could achieve more in life if I worked harder at it. Every day, it seems, becomes a struggle. I still am constrained by the oppression of lost chances, poor choices, outside forces, and fate. Yet, I am going to try this new journey.

Another Sunday

I awoke this morning rather tired from not having slept very well last night. Sleeping through the night has been one of the more difficult things for me to do lately. I am not sure why I can't; I suspect some aspect of my health is part of it. The older I get, the more my physical health seems to be creeping up as an issue. I feel like it's an unkempt garden, charming early on perhaps, but increasingly a problem later.

Sunday is my day for going out to a study group. I won't say what or why at this point because some things are going to be just for me.

Anyway, I got ready and organized and was out the door by 9:30, time enough to make it to the group if I went straight there, but I decided that I should visit my mom at her shop first. It was a check in. I am concerned about the amount of work and stress that she seems to be constantly under. I don't know how to help alleviate any of that, so I keep checking in. She said that she would like to have an unsweetened iced tea from McDonald's. It is one of her minor indulgences that she allows herself, and I am not going to be an insensitive jerk and discourage it. It is also hard not to see it as a stress reliever. And as a demonstration of care for someone, there isn't anything quite like treating them to food, or in this case, tea.

The wait in the fast food line was really long since they had not made the tea for that day. They were in full-blown breakfast mode, selling their breakfast sandwiches left and right. I indulged myself and ordered one, and later, after having eaten it, wondered how something so remarkably tasty could leave you feeling so unsatisfied. It is one of the oddities about that particular form of fast food.

I delivered the tea back to my mother, all while worrying about how inordinately late I was going to be. I drove in an mild panic thinking about the interruption that I was sure I was going to cause with my late arrival. However, without speeding (a minor point of pride), I was only a few minutes late and relieved to see that they had not yet begun.

As for the group itself, overall I enjoyed it and am already looking forward to next week. I will say that the group dynamic was a little strained during the middle. There are some real gems of knowledge that come out this meeting for me. However, at times, some of the other participants seemed to get bogged down in their own ideas and people start to get frustrated. If I do speak, which I try not to, I only try to point out what I find personally illuminating about what it is we are reading.

Afterwards, everyone decides that they want to attend a buffet lunch downtown, which is where the real heart of the meeting emerges. With ten people, I imagine it to be something like the large feasts you see in period movies where guests try to engage each other with interesting anecdotes about their own lives. The cool avenues of knowledge that are explored during the earlier meeting finally dissolves into the broad paths of warm feeling. I was very worried that the one participant who seemed to be the focal point of the earlier strain during the meeting wasn't eating, and yet to bring up the issue might have caused embarrassment.

After it was done, I made my goodbyes and left. I wandered to the bookstore and made a half-hearted attempt to look for an engaging book on design, but left without a more full exploration. Most of the books there, seemed like ones I had seen there before. I did some more walking downtown before finally getting to my car and calling a former college colleague about a debt I needed to repay.

During my video class, I was in a group that needed an actor. So, I asked a friend from the photography class we shared if she would mind helping out. Because the project involved a lot of on location shots and travel, I was seriously worried that I was asking too much. Therefore, I promised her that I could give her a nine by nine sheet of muslin to use as a photographer's backdrop. I knew that she and another friend had already painted one, and that she might like to make another one. However, that video class was one of the last ones of my final term, and then I was out of school when I finally got the muslin. With it finally in hand, it was difficult trying to figure out how to get it to her. She was working overseas for a few months I had it. I knew that she acted in the video as a favor and wasn't at all concerned about getting anything in return, but I was seriously worried about leaving this promise unfulfilled and debt unpaid.

I finally called her up and asked if I could deliver it to her, to which she said yes. I felt relieved it was finally in her hands. We talked for a bit in her driveway before I left.

I made my way to Value Village to look for some blue jeans and possibly a shirt. And it was there among the racks of used clothes that I started to have some trouble. I saw myself in the other patrons of that store and realized just how poor and out-of-shape I was. The financial poverty I have struggled with all my life has left some deep social scars that seem difficult for me to repair. For one, I would like to dress more attractively, but I don't know how and, worse, would feel uncomfortable in anything other than jeans and T-shirts. Under fluorescent lights, I mentally went down the list on how deficient I felt I was in regards to my appearance, a process which ultimately leads me to same unpleasant mental place again and again and again. My imagined solution to the problem of this bad feeling is irrational, somewhat selfish, and unpractical. Intellectually, I know this. And yet, I want it so strongly anyway that it forces that knowledge to the side where I do my best to ignore it. The real solution to problem is not removing the consequence of these bad feeling through distractions, but controlling the conditions that cause the bad feelings to arise. Strike at the root cause and not its effects. Easier said than done.

I went home and took refuge in bed, trying to catch up on that sleep I missed. I was probably a mistake to do so, but it made me feel slightly better. The empty feeling of not accomplishing something more tangible during a day is preferable to the misery of berating oneself for conditions that cannot be alleviated overnight. I awoke, had a chocolate cereal dinner, watched some television before writing this post. As it is more of the proper time for bed, I am going to resolve to do better tomorrow.

Changes

Looks like Google changed the layout of my website somehow. I am not sure that I did anything to change it, but there is the possibility that I did. It has been a long while since I last posted here, it's difficult to know for sure. I do know that there has been many changes on the backend of this program. The whole mobile first movement seems to be at fault for it. My feeling about that is somewhat mixed. Yes, I do know that all things internet seems to be moving towards the mobile market. However, it is my feeling that the mobile form does not allow for the longer essay like posts that I prefer. I will try to hang on to words as long as I can, even though our visual culture marches forward.

Disappointments

Not that I have abandoned this blog, far from it. It's simply that I do not feel the same motivation that I had for writing that I once did. I know that isn't much of an excuse, but at least it is an explanation.

It's somewhat fair to say that I been feeling poorly, but perhaps that is a bit of an understatement too. I've been grappling with a lot of issues related to my self-concept. It feels as if I am falling into a direction in life that I wouldn't have chosen for myself if I could have avoided it. It seems that, for the rest of my life, I will be as poor as ever. I have far too many debts from school, a tremendous burden that will sap the opportunities for a life with simple pleasures: a wife, a home, a family, etc. My naivete was extreme in my college days, but there was no-one to tell me where I was headed. And of course, I might have not listened anyway.

I feel a bit upset when I consider how a future life of poverty was incurred as a result of my striving for something better (a PhD and professorship), and then failing at it because of my ignorance of myself, my difficult and (also failed) romantic experiences, and seeming inability to endure it all. But there it is. It cannot be bargained with or changed. It was real and it happened. Therefore, I must continue on and face consequences of actions that I did not know I had chosen at the time.

I am trying to make the best of it. One of the things I most frequently hear from friends and family is that "life is what you make of it." True enough to provide some hope and thereby small measure of comfort. And yet, while one can try to improve life and circumstances to a degree, no-one seems to acknowledge its severe limitations. Life restricts opportunity as much as it provides it. The difficult life lesson is learning how to accept its restrictions with calm equanimity and be unperturbed in the face of failures.

I wonder how people who experience a persistent and oppressive injustice in their life learn to cope with the outside forces that prevent them from attaining their visions of comforts and happinesses. I should consider myself lucky that I do not experience racism, persecution, hunger, and etc. that many people the world over do. I suspect that the key is to ignore the restrictions imposed from the outside and learn to be content with the life one leads on the inside, but as with everything, knowing something isn't the same as doing it. Or in my case, feeling it.

I hope to continue on my internal path of change, so that I conform my behavior to my vision of a better and happier self. Faced with frustrations, depressions, irritations, and unhappiness it seems hard for me to get there. I will not, and cannot ignore restrictions. Most modern folks I talk with say this is the way to get happy, but really they seem to be advocating blindness and ignorance. There should be a richer path of acknowledging injustice, pain, and disappointment without it sending your emotions careening over the edge into an expanding void. I grasp at the solid iron bar of calm acceptance, but it still seems a little out of reach.

Inflated Pride

On my bed are two balloons: one, blue, and the other green. I bought them a couple of years ago in one of those dollar store packages of balloons you get at the grocery store or Walmart. Most people buy balloons for some party giving occasion, but I bought them because I intended to use them for a photoshoot for a student design project for a book about clowning. In the end, although I took the pictures, I did not use them for the project. Instead, I took a picture of a classmate wearing the clown nose I had bought. She had an anxious, almost sad expression. The balloons came home to rest on the television nook for a year. I took them off about a week ago, intending to use them for a friends party. I was a guest, but even for all of my outward hilarity, I felt out of place. For one, I was among the very few attendees who did not have children. Most of my friends were distracted by their offspring for much of the visit and our conversations only occurred in brief half-minute exchanges that are difficult to piece together into an entire thread. Thought is broken up, and lacking words to fill the spaces between us, emotion fills in the cracks. This time, it was anxiety and embarrassment for having become this old without a clear direction in life, and a certain sadness for being middle-aged and not having a place entirely of my own or a career that marks me as a reasonably successful person who has the means to provide solely for himself and, perhaps, one or two others. The balloons came home in my jacket pocket, and somehow, through a series of small and unremarkable and forgettable daily actions, ended up on my bed next to my evening reading material.

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I have had a couple of tormenting dreams. The most memorable of which was not the one in which I experienced the hell of being in a place or among people who I did not wish to be around and responding to their terrible actions. No, the most memorable and meaningful one centered on how my vision of myself, my self-concept, is opposed to reality and is mildly delusional in a mundane manner. However, please do not think that I mean to say "delusional" that I imagine myself as some character like "Napoleon," or think of myself special and unique, apart from every other human on the planet. Other than the experience of being human with human thoughts when we find ourselves by ourselves with moments for reflection, I do not live in a world separate from reality, nor do I have such a disconnection with reality that I cannot operate as a functional member in it.

The delusions that I mean are the ones that the generality of humanity has about itself in our era. We each think of ourselves as the heroic actors struggling in the movie or play of ourselves, and how we are being either shaped by tragedy or accomplishment, we thereby achieve the natural results of our endeavors, endeavors that most of us judge to be good.

And yet, this belief is nothing short of vanity.

As young people, this sort of vain thinking is so extreme in its improbability as to be utterly laughable if it was mentioned aloud. As adults who have mellowed (or tried to) in their years, the struggles we imagine lend to our shaping as beings of pure virtue surrounded by difficulty are much, much more mundane. No longer do we imagine ridiculous success filled with fame and fortune; instead, we find our "heroic" struggles in paying bills, dealing with co-workers or relatives, or some other life event. But, in its way, this sort of thinking is can be no less vain or laughable.

Which leads me to my dream. I cannot say what the images were that played in my head, who the "actors" were in this dream, or what I saw. Frankly, I have forgotten it; perhaps, if I try to recall as accurately as I can, I saw myself. The real meaning of the dream was in its impact. I realized that how I see myself in my daily actions, how I comport myself in my head and the thoughts I have about myself, can be in complete and utter conflict with how things really are. My thoughts, which I believed were a reflection of reality, a pilgrim's path of virtue, were in fact, imaginings that were vain to a such degree that it led me to blindness.

My attachments to how I want my life to go, to how I want to direct myself to this new heroism of virtue, lead me to think of myself as an heroic actor. And yet, to really be a decent man, I have to give up this stupid thought. I am not a mighty hero, standing tall with a sword of nobility against the gales of ungodly daily enemies. Enemies representing everything from my propensity for anger when a driver cuts me off, or my pride of intelligence and creativity I feel I receive an unfair criticism about my work. Yes, I do need to fight against those things, to give up anger and pride. But to imagine myself as the heroic actor in this play of myself? That is too much limited thinking. It makes me the center of a universe that disdains me for silly haughtiness and spits me out towards wretchedness.

I must strive to be a better person who can attain virtuous qualities and do a good deed or two a day, but I should also give up the idea that I am a better person for doing so, because that leads to pride, which causes blindness, and then people fall. And when they fall, the fall horribly hard and damage themselves. There is another thought here about seeing the end in the beginning, about how recognizing how this path of pride and vanity will lead to falls, and therefore, seeing danger ahead, one can avoid it. But I will leave that thought for another time, so that I may better try to hold on to the feeling of being exposed in my dream for my vain thinking which has led me to this wasted day and feelings of remorse for the stupid things I say and do in these occasions. I truly want to be a better person, I want to be virtuous, but life can really show me up sometimes, so I have to guard myself from too much stupidity on my part and recognize that, for how much I think I know, I really don't know anything.