The Thaw, part 1

I am getting older. I am questioning everything. Some things have been confirmed, and those foundations shall be given more care and attention. Other things have been, or may yet be, discarded. The aspects of my life that I have chosen to change, the things that I have let go of, felt like a weight I was obliged to carry on my shoulders, and when I could go no further and had to put down my burden, I found no one and nothing telling me to pick it back up. I was startled at my own freedom. I have since become more wary of my obligations, and just as my sensitivity to undeserved expectations has become more acute recently, so has my awareness of the people and ideas in my life that really matter to me, and might have been receiving only lip service for too long.

I think even more than getting older, I am growing. I mentioned earlier in this blog that sometimes it is best for people to grow out of relationships, and that wishing things were otherwise is not healthy for anyone, but at that time I was perhaps too hasty in my assessment of those closest to me. I might be making the same mistake now, but I know the change is coming, and I recognize now as then that it will happen one way or the other.

I have this image attached to the notion of growth. I suppose I could best describe it as streamlining. That which is most central to who I am has been reaffirmed and strengthened, and even aspects of myself that I had once cherished and had recently forgotten have been uncovered again by this process. Some new elements have been incorporated too, but they seem to share the spirit of what has always mattered to me, and represent a growth out of those ideas.

I hope the following will be somewhat of a disambiguation of the preceding:

Winter break was the catalyst for all this change.

I had developed a rut since I'd been at Columbia, but by the first semester of Junior year, and maybe even the preceding summer, I knew it. I am still struggling with my reasons for being here, and I have been considering many questions the answers to which may illuminate my situation and my path in the future:

What is an academic? Am I one? Is that the same thing as being a student? Am I even a "student" anymore?

Should I be looking around for my career here in college? Is that realistic? Should I be studying my interests or some hybrid of my interests and pragmatic, marketable skills?

If I don't get a job in the field of my major, what will the point of going to college have been?

I don't know the answers to many of these questions. Some part of me gets the sense that I could never be an academic. No part of me wants to enrich human understanding as a whole. It would seem that I am after more personal answers, answers on an individual level. It could be that I'll find those answers by looking outward, but lately I find it hard to find a great deal of affinity for humanity as a whole. These days, it's draining enough to care about me and mine, and I have enough questions for myself without trying to figure the world out. And the problem is that whatever atrocities I may be ignoring, whatever social ills I should be out combating, I see humanity's hand behind them all. There is some idealism left in me, and I know that the ignorance I abhor is sometimes simply a lack of education, a lack of civilization and reverence for thought. We owe it to a great many people to cultivate a human culture of compassion based on reason and respect for our shared human condition.

Maybe people fight because they don't realize how doomed we all are anyways. Maybe if they really believed that all of us only had one life and realized how short it was, people could be more peaceful. It breaks my heart to think of how many things I wish I could hold on to forever, but will eventually pass away from me. Too many people think themselves immortal.

Anyways, I think I got sidetracked somewhere.

You know, I thought this would be an easy blog post. I've been through perhaps the most emotionally tiring couple weeks of my life, and I can't even be poetical and eloquent about it. I was messed up last semester, so much so that even a relatively easy workload felt like a grind. I felt out of touch with pretty much everything, only to come home and find no relief and unlooked for questions about people and things I had always counted on. I think I started losing my mind. And only after that came the most painful emotional blow I've ever experienced. What was meant to be an "intervention" for me, with my friends expressing their concern over my increasingly withdrawn demeanor, resulted in my roommate telling me that in the wake of his father's death last semester, he needed me more than anyone else in the world, but that I wasn't there for him. Ostensibly, he said all of this to tell me how obviously absent I was, but this seemed like something he wanted to confront me about with regard to our relationship. I'm not sure how much my other friends knew about how this supposed intervention was going to turn out, but I hope they didn't know he was going to do that.

I have never felt so guilty, so embarrassed, or so angry. I hope I never will again.

It was clear to me that our relationship was one thing in his mind, and something entirely different in mine. He had made me into something that I was not willing to be to him, and he wanted me to act in a way that I was not willing to act. And so he became disillusioned and hurt at my apparent failure to act the part of his friend. He had made what should have been a discussion between the two of us, taking place months beforehand, into a guilt trip aimed right at me and abetted by my closest friends.

I have many more thoughts on this that I will not share. Things between us now are not good, and most interestingly, I don't really care.

But the most remarkable thing happened after all that, and I felt better than I had in weeks.

I'll tell you all about it later.

Trains, first attempt

I like riding on trains. It reminds me of how much I will never know and never see. I stare out the windows at the places in between, all the places I'll never call home, and wonder at the strange fortune of ending up in my own skin. On the train, I smile at everyone, and I love them in a way I couldn't love them if we were to pass on the street. We're all on our way somewhere I think, and I smile. We're only together for a short time, in a small place, with the whole world outside the window waiting for us to turn our heads, to look out at places never given to us to love but for a fleeting second until they pass beyond our vision. And maybe we look at each other, weightless in the void, to see ourselves - small things adrift in infinity.

How much like life it is.

Taking a look around

I think I've asked these questions before, but finding the answer has greater importance now that I'm on the road to mental emancipation: what does everyone my age do on a Friday night, and why doesn't any of that interest me? More to the point, what can I be doing with my free time that's recreational but not just a way of killing time? I've decided video games are not the way to go, and looking back I probably could have done a million better things with my time. That being said, the importance of time spent having fun with friends can't be understated, and I can't have expected my former self to be looking for anything more. In a way it's kind of unfortunate, but I'm no longer satisfied with simply killing the free time between assignments and responsibilities, so now I have to look outward.

Back to my first questions.

Did some work yesterday, went to the Frick Collection to begin my formal analysis of one of their portraits for Art Humanities. Even did a sketch of the portrait, and despite the condition of the gentleman's face, I think I portrayed the drapery quite well. Anyways long story short, I came back, made dinner, and was ready to spend the rest of the night NOT working. So I fired up Counter-Strike Source, and played for a couple hours. Outside our door to the hall, quite a large party could be heard (and smelled) across the hall, but I had no desire to join at all. Recently it seems, parties, or at least the parties we tend to have here, have lost their appeal. For one, they mostly consist of people standing around drinking (unlike us enlightened West coasters who prefer drinking games. Seriously...no one plays them here), but more importantly they're on campus, in dorms. So in protest to staying on campus drinking, I decided to stay in my room and play a video game. I admit that doesn't make a lot of sense, but it was actually the more challenging and interesting of the two options. It was about then that I tried to make a list of things people my age do on Friday nights. I came up with the following:

20-somethings do this on Friday nights:
1. Go to campus parties, drink
2. Go to bars and restaurants downtown, maybe shoot pool, drink
3. Go clubbing, drop E, drink
4. Play video games, drink (maybe)
5. Watch TV/movies (with or without friends), drink (probably)

And then probably the most noble in my view...
6. Go to jazz clubs, listen to awesome music, drink

Looking at this list now, I think I understand a little better why I went for number 4, and why after I week I'll probably go for number 2. The reason is, I think, that those are the only two that aren't completely passive...that don't simply involve you going somewhere and then taking in the scene. But the problem with all of them, and the reason I need a new hobby, is that none of them produce or teach anything. After talking with Kenny about this for a while we came to the conclusion that what both he and I want is a project, or maybe even more than that - a MISSION.

It was then that we started talking about the (totally epic) movie we made for Japanese, and the programs we used to write for computer science, and the thing they all had in common was that after toiling away for what seemed like forever (all told the movie took about a month...), overcoming obstacles and achieving small triumphs, we were left with a finished product we had created from scratch. We had made something with our time. And realizing the possibility of deciding for ourselves what we could do with our time and effort was invigorating, despite the vague nature of that possibility. What does someone do when they can do anything?

I think I'm going to make some small changes first:
1. Work permitting, this blog is going to go daily again
2. I'm going to get a bonsai because I want to take care of something and watch it grow

Bigger things that are probably on the horizon:
1. More movies
2. More programming (in my spare time), maybe play with Flash, maybe some web design
3. More photography (going to invest in a new camera, probably after new headphones)

And maybe once some vagueries are sorted out, formats decided on, objectives set, and scopes established, maybe...just maybe...we will produce something very new and exciting.

Whatever happens, and whatever I end up doing, I think I need to get out of the box and off the list of Friday night time-wasters. While school work will continue to take priority, I think I waste enough time every week and weekend to be able to do something interesting and constructive instead of simply trying to entertain myself.

A Wilde idea

"Life is too important to be taken seriously" - Oscar Wilde

As you know, I've been thinking a lot recently about the manner in which I should live my life - not so much about what I'm doing, but how I'm doing it. Recently it seems, I've learned the value and necessity of courage, and realized that perhaps the greatest danger to leading a fulfilling life is fear. So often it seems that fear drives people into complacency, because the routine and familiar can instill a sense of control. It's like the NIN lyric, "I believe I can see the future, as I repeat the same routine" - it's easy to tell the future if its the same thing every day. But knowing how your life is going to turn out isn't the point of being alive.

It's with that in mind that I've come to respect people who can live fearlessly and, one could even say carelessly, because they'll never have to suffer the regret of missed opportunities. I might even go so far as to say that death is a very small thing compared to a life lived in fear of really living. Better to be constantly at the mercy of life in all of its uncertainty.

I know someone who likes to burn the candle from both ends and is often the subject of concern from friends and parents, and many people would say this person is deeply troubled. While I'd probably agree with that assessment, I think I admire the fact that this person lives illogically and seems to be completely off the rails. Part of me believes that life is best lived close to death, or at least uncertainty, because taking one's life too seriously may be missing the point of being alive.

I know I'm grasping at a lot of complex ideas, and I'm sure I'll come back to all of them, but if this post has to be about one thing, it would be my admiration for courageous people, and people who understand what really matters in this life.

Ask yourself: what is there to be truly afraid of in your life? When is fear healthy?

More later,

Bryan

Who's to say?

So, my day began with a phone call from my mom, saying she had to be hospitalized because of the multiple pulmonary embolisms in her lungs that had probably developed as a result of a blood clot in her calf. It seemed she was out of danger now, but it was apparently only by chance that these embolisms (which I have learned since then are blood clots that travel throughout the body) did not lodge in her heart and cause a heart attack, or become lodged in a critical area of her lungs and kill her. But because they didn't, the only treatment required is a simple administration of blood thinners, in large amounts at first via IV, and then later in pill form. Whew.

It's not a fun exercise to contemplate your parent's death, but every once in a while it seems that you aren't given a choice, which brings me to my point.

When I think about death (and I really try not to, as a rule), I tend to ask myself what would make someone content enough with their life to accept their death. Many people have said that you can't separate death from life, but the opposite appears to be true - death must be evaluated with respect to the life that preceded it. So, the big question: what makes a good/happy/successful/fulfilling life?

Money.

Make lots of money.

Just kidding. Wouldn't that be awesome though? Anyways, I definitely don't have an answer yet, only some thoughts and guesses.

Off the top of my head, I'm going to say there are two schools of thought on what makes a meaningful life: the journey people, and the destination people. The first group, as you may already have guessed, think a good life is found in the act of living, in the way a person chooses to deal with the realities of their experience. The second group choose a goal for their lives, and their satisfaction with their lives at any given moment corresponds with their success in pursuing this goal. I know I'm painting in broad strokes here, but I'm trying to distill some fundamental ideas about how people look at their lives.

Back to my mom for a second. I have to wonder what she thinks of her life at this point. Sometimes I envy the perspective she has on life, having lived a great deal more of it than I have. She's told me before that children are at a disadvantage because they often don't know the whole story of how their parents came to be the people they are today, and that sometimes it keeps the children from realizing the humanity that they share with their parents, that their parents also often flailed around for years and years until they finally fell into circumstances conducive to a more stable life. I think if I truly believed that, maybe I wouldn't worry so much about my future. But then I have to ask if she's lived the life she wanted, and if, faced with the end, she would be content. To use a tired metaphor, we stand at opposite ends of a gulf, one looking forward and the other looking back.

If I had to choose, I'd say I fall into the journey school of thought. I can't think of any great ambition for my life, or what I want to get from the world. I'm looking for a point of view from which to confront every day, but I lack the goals of the destination people that help them stay oriented on their path. I'm sure I'll go into some of this stuff in greater detail later, and I'll definitely have to flesh out this whole "meaning of life business" (could I have picked a broader first topic? Seriously.). For now I think I'll try to learn as many skills as possible, and try my hand at traveling. Perhaps with more experience, I'll find my path out there somewhere.

One final thought. The greatest virtue of the traveler is courage, and his greatest enemy is comfort, because comfort is what makes the traveler cease to be a traveler.

This'll have to do for a first effort. More later

Bryan