No enemy is as persistent as that of reality. When your job is to escape it, to dream big, to transform it, reality will consistently and uniformly level your sandcastle every. single. time. A chinese proverb goes “I dreamed a thousand new path… I woke up and walked my old one.” Becoming a world changer requires that you are perpetually fighting an inconquerable foe, and frankly it’s just exhausting.
Every day I long for that time where I’ll step out from under this scaffold life into the gloriously unprepared and unexpected. We’re all so frightened by this opportunity, and I find the entire situation baffling. I can’t wait for a time when the only requirements that I have are to feed myself and care for those that I love. There are so many coastlines I want to walk, so many places I want to visit, so many people I want to meet, and so many things I’d like to experience. None of which I can do so long as I have to be in school the following Monday.
People around are rushing to be established, and I just can’t wait for the moment when it won’t be irresponsible to cut that crap out of my life. And if that’s crazy, I can’t wait for the moment when I can run away from all the people who agree. I’m seeking coherency between my ideals and my world, and will stop at nothing to get it.
Cut me loose, I can’t wait to run free.
Despite what may look like a flurry of posts, I haven’t written all of these entries in the last few days. I’ve written a lot that has been “scheduled” to be posted to a later date in order to give me adequate time to look over what I’ve written and make sure it’s what I mean.
The internet is really great for people who like to do things. Say you want to build a loft bed… out of pipe. Or meet together with random people… lots of them. Think it and do it.
That’s pretty cool, I’ll admit. But what I think is cooler is if you stretch your imagination to find things that you’d like to do that aren’t quite so common. Like building a digital computer using water pressure, or having a discussion about the possibility of a sonic boom equivalent for light, or sleeping on the floor.
And sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you’ll find people who not only like what you like… but think like you think.
# Aaron Says:
November 15th, 2007 at 6:41 pmI slept on the floor of my room for a year at least, at still do occasionally. Something about the austerity and not needing a mattress or bedframe appealed to me. Plus, as a not-as-frequent-as-I’d-like traveler, I figured it would be beneficial to be able to sleep in many different situations (although I still can’t sleep on a goddamned plane). Anyway, sleeping on the floor was early practice, I suppose, preparing myself (my spine) for whatever situation came my way.
I slept with a couple blankets beneath me and could fold it up and put it in the corner when I wasn’t sleeping. I dunno, I just really like the idea of being mobile, being able to move fast and easy if I need to.# Tim Boucher Says:
November 15th, 2007 at 6:54 pmI dunno, I just really like the idea of being mobile, being able to move fast and easy if I need to.
Yeah, I feel creepy and dead if I can’t live like that.
Tonight, this struck a really heavy chord with me and my recent (and not so recent) experiences:
Others, however, will find that they can’t make that choice even if they wanted to. Tempting as it may sometimes be to trade in their lonely load of questions for a ready-made community and cosmology, it’s too late: a hatched chick might as well try to get back in the egg. When they do venture into a place of traditional worship – out of nostalgic yearning, or just for somebody else’s wedding or funeral, baptism or Bar Mitzvah — their ears can’t unhear the primitive superstition and tribal jingoism all mixed up with the timeless wisdom of the scriptures. I don’t know how many times my heart has been warmed by the deep familial glow in a synagogue, only to sink into my shoes as the Bat Mitzvah girl stumbled uncomprehendingly through some recipe for animal sacrifice from Leviticus. As “Donaldito,” born Catholic, posted on the popular website Beliefnet: “I consider myself a seeker, and returning to the place that started me on that journey feels pretty good . . . until I actually listen to a lot of what’s being said.” Now that the free-form quest is no longer in fashion, it’s your gut that will tell you whether you’re a spiritual refugee, homesick for the right roof over your head, or a spiritual nomad, at home in the open.
It’s for you hard-core wonderers and wanderers – my scattered tribe – that I want to send up a flare, pitch a tent, put out some desert rations. I don’t care what faith you were born into, what you call your higher power, what spiritual disciplines you do or don’t practice: if you viscerally resist having your religion organized for you, if living with your questions is the only form of worship that feels honest and alive to you, you’re one of us. Like many of our biblical forebears, we postmodern pilgrims answered a call to leave the houses of our fathers and strike out for an unknown future. We’re deeply convinced that that call came from the Spirit, and we’re not turning back. But right now a lot of us feel lost, with no promised land in sight. Tradition’s new triumph is our crisis. That means, of course, that it contains both a danger and an opportunity. The danger is that we’ll slowly lose our convictions, or watch them splinter into a thousand consoling little niche cults. The chance, the challenge, is to become fully conscious of those convictions for the first time.
Many people today would describe the stock market as volatile, unpredictable, dangerous, and risky among hundreds of other displeasing adjectives. With peoples’ entire lives devoted to predicting the every move of a graph, sucessive failures are easier to chalk up to external causes or “irrationality” than untalented surveyors of the markets. What they should really be saying is: “my normal approach is useless here.” A good rule of thumb (Hanlon’s thumb, apparently) is “never attribute to malice what can be explained with ignorance.” A corollary might be “never mark an action irrational when it can be explained in human terms.” What drives the markets right now more than ever more is fear, greed, and uncertainty. Hundreds of other factors have lost their correlation (among them valuations and financial fundamentals) and the best of the best throw their hands in the air and suggest the problem is unsolvable. Ha. Really it has been made that much simpler. Might I suggest the same heuristic be applied to each of the other problems in this world that we find so mysterious? If you look carefully, most of the unpredictability stems from contamination from a human fingerprint. Let’s start with war…