And Two Become One

     Change is death.  Or at least that's what the majority of people believe.  In order to start a new diet, they have to kill of the old one.  To start exercising, laziness must die.  To quit a job, some violence (hopefully metaphorical) must occur.  In the most fundamental way people seem to feel the need to kill something, inside or out, in order to become stronger.
     I don't think this is the way of things, though, because those gremlins (someone else's coined term for inner monsters) never stay dead.  They always find  ways of manifesting themselves until the person is so tired of failing to change that they just give up.  For a while, because even the gremlin of change doesn't stay slaughtered long.
     But what if death and change are not one and the same?  An old diet may not need to die for a new one to live.  Instead, the old diet and the new one may be the same thing, the new inevitably growing from the old and able to come in no other way.  A difference, perhaps, more than a change.  Wonderful if true.
     The question then becomes;  why doesn't this happen?  It's practically the stuff of fairy-tales to say that a old crappy life can spontaneously become a new life resplendent with health and happiness.  But with all the killing going on, this is hardly surprising.  When you try to destroy the old you, you're hacking at the roots from which change and newness spring.  And it's a self-perpetuating cycle;  your effort to kill the you that is killing you is just more of the same.
     You don't need to stop killing so much as you need to stop believing in the power of death and violence to bring change.  Force begets force, but change comes through growth, not death.

The Meaning of being Meant for Greatness

     I have always thought of greatness as something great.  By that, I mean something that feels great, something that is awesome in the most literal sense of the word.  This might be flawed.
     "Meant for greatness" means that greatness is a forgone conclusion.  But if greatness is in my nature, then why should it be given any more credit than anything else I do?  I don't feel awe or wonder when I brush my teeth or eat a meal.  These are simple daily routines, things I do without thought and often without notice.  Perhaps the key to being great, as I am meant to be, is for greatness to become routine and below notice.  Greatness not as an effort towards something higher or an exaltation, but as a routine, an activity of great importance but little note.
     All my life, I've thought of greatness in terms of feelings.  When I act great or achieve something great, then I'm supposed to feel great.  But is that not the mark of the amateur, the novice, the less-than-great?  I don't think God, if he exists, would be in awe of His own greatness.  He would take it for granted as a given.  So if we are to be gods, then perhaps it is also necessary that we take no pride in or notice of our own greatness.  Perhaps the final secret of greatness is that it's not.

Brutal Honesty

          I have found the solution to one of my most socially crippling disabilities;  the inability to effectively hit on women.  I still have a lot to learn, but from now on it will be an actual learning experience rather than a desperate effort to compensate for a handicap.  The solution is surprisingly simple, depressingly obvious, and almost universally discouraged.  For you see, the answer is Brutal Honesty.
          My biggest difficulty was that I didn't want girls to know I was hitting on them.  I wanted them to react as if they knew I was attracted to them, but without actually having to openly communicate as much.  I would try to make conversation and act interested in a girl, but it would be stilted and inauthentic.  I wouldn't ask the questions that I really wanted the answers to, and even if I made my interest explicitly known I would not allow any implicit natural signals of attraction to slip through.
           I confirmed all of this in the course of one such conversation.  I noticed an attractive girl on the train, and I started talking to her.  Although it was obvious to me that there should be some connection between us, she barely responded at all.  In fact, she preferred working on her desperately uninteresting homework rather than further pursuing conversation with me.
          So I sat back for a few minutes and compared this situation with some previous experiences I had had.  I remembered one in particular, where I had been sitting next to a girl on an airplane who had been utterly resistant to conversation until I came out with the line "Do you get hit on a lot, or is that just a really interesting magazine?"  Instantly, her manner toward me changed.  Adapting that line to my current situation, I asked the current girl "What are you looking for when a guy hits on you?"
           Once again, instant response.  She didn't know what she was looking for, but in her response she let me know;  she was looking for a man with the courage and self-assurance to be attracted to her.  Not just attracted, but obviously attracted, in front of God and everybody.  After a little more conversation, I asked her for her number, to which she gave the typical response of girls that I hit on;  she had a boyfriend.
           However, she did not say no.  So I asked again, and again.  She tried to misdirect me or ignore me, but I would not be misdirected or ignored.  I knew I was in control because I knew that she wanted to give me her number.  She got more and more flustered, moving her head in quick jerks and looking down at her homework and generally avoiding eye contact.  Even more telling, she began involuntarily smiling and biting/sucking on her bottom lip, which is probably the most adorable thing a cute girl can do in public.  Eventually, after a succession of noncommittal answers, she made a quip about my persistence and gave me her number.
          There is a reason I call it Brutal Honesty and not just Honesty.  In order to succeed, I had to respond to her as a person, not a persona.  For most people, this is very painful.  She didn't want to know that she wanted to give me her number, and even worse, she didn't want any of the other people on the train to know.  She just wanted to safely and blindly be faithful to her boyfriend, and if that meant hiding from her desires then desire be damned.  My honesty was both painful and euphoric to her.  It is wonderful knowing what you want and being encouraged to take it, but it's also disconcerting when there are so many other voices saying that it is wrong.
           Brutal Honesty is not be limited to flirting, either.  Soon after this incident, I had a job interview that I wanted very much to go well.  While sitting in the waiting room, I wondered what I could say or do to convince the interviewer that I was the best candidate for the job.  Then it occurred to me that if honesty could get me a number, perhaps it could also get me a job.  I committed myself to making it obvious that I wanted this job and knew I deserved it.
          As far as I can tell, the interview went spectacularly well aside from some awkward small-talk.  The main interviewer seemed to respond fairly well, but I really shined when she introduced me to my potential future co-workers (whom I believe will have a big hand in picking candidates).  They laughed and joked and basically acted as if I had already been hired.  I could hardly imagine things having gone better, even though this was only my third real interview ever.
          So if honesty works so well, why doesn't everybody do it?  Well, it's frightening to be Brutally Honest at first, because most of us have learned to treat real honesty as if it were doing actual violence to a person.  The fact that the words Brutal and Honesty can even be associated together is proof of that.  It is an almost impossible barrier to overcome, because nobody wants to be honest if it comes at the price of hurting someone else.  But the real brutality is living life behind a facade to protect the world from your own brilliant power and potential.  Don't worry, the world will survive.  It might even give you its number.

What if we're gods?

          I used to have a problem with stress eating.  My reaction to being stressed or bored was to eat until I felt sick.  I no longer have this problem.

          The problem is that I didn't do anything to fix it.  I moved into a new apartment last week, and bought a bunch of groceries.  I bought a lot of healthy food, which is something I would have done in the past since I don't like wasting money on things that aren't good for me.  I only buy unhealthy food in [lots of] small doses.  My expectation was that in two or three days I would get stressed out and go buy a pizza or something unhealthy.  Then I would give up on eating healthy altogether and just live off of pizza.  This is how it always played out in the past.  But not this time.

           I sit here now, very hungry and with nothing to stop me from at least getting a Subway sandwich.  Except I don't care to.  It's not as if I am trying to avoid eating fast food or anything unhealthy.  I simply have no desire to.  When I feel like it I'll get up and eat a grapefruit, or maybe some boiled eggs and a pear.  The only reason that I'm even aware that I was ever a dysfunctional eater is that I remember how I used to react in situations like this.

          There wasn't a solid cut-off point between the way I used to eat and now.  It wasn't an "aha" moment.  I didn't even know that I'd stopped being screwed up until I noticed that I wasn't going to get twelve inches of pepperoni and cheese foam.  I can't be excited or grateful, because I didn't feel anything change.  I may as well have always been like this, for how different I feel.

          That makes me wonder;  what if that's the secret to life?  What if one day I wake up and find that I have become everything I ever dreamt of becoming, except I don't notice until I actually go out and do it?  No incident or indication, just a new me that is capable of anything.  No exciting changes, no trumpets, no apotheosis, nothing at all.  I just walk out my door and forge a lightning bolt, and wonder why I remember ever being unable to do so.  Are we allowed to become gods without the ability to appreciate it?  Because I think the only way to become a god is to always have been one.

What was, is. What is, will be.

          Are you tired?  I'm tired.  Do you feel sick?  I have a headache.  Are you secure?  I am tens of thousands of dollars in debt, have a part-time job that I haven't even started yet that could end at any time, and resume that could get me a job at Starbucks but doesn't seem to interest anyone else.  Are you inevitable?  I am.

          I look around my room, a wasteland of half-unpacked junk that I've developed an emotional attachment to, and what I feel is that this is inevitable for me to become what I must become.  There is nothing perfect about me.  I'm a huge wad of clay, all potential and no actual.  I'm tired, in pain, disorganized, unmotivated, and basically without any redeeming characteristics beyond what I one day could be.  But what I will be is a function of what I am and what I was.

          There is no difference between me a year ago and me a year from now.  This mess around me, figuratively and literally, is the means by which I will become the man I am to be.  It's not something to be avoided or overcome.  It's a springboard into the future, where I will be far more than I could imagine right now.  I'm not afraid of my mess, because I know that it will take care of me.  It is my future, manifested here in the present where I can see it with my own eyes.  It will easily and naturally take me to the place where I belong, and the less I fight it the sooner I will get there.

          Normally, a mess is something to clean up, a nasty thing to be avoided at all costs and gotten rid of as soon as possible.  That's just destructive positivity talking, though.  In our society (or my society, at least), we are taught that our lives are supposed to be full of bright sunshine and clean floors.  Darkness and uncertainty are things to be avoided.  This is wrong, because darkness and uncertainty are as necessary to our development as sunshine.  Not only that, but we can't seem to get rid of them no matter how hard we try to look at shadows as if they were daylight.  I don't believe that positivity is necessarily a positive thing, nor do I believe that negativity is necessarily negative.  If my world is messy, I say let it be messy.  It will clean itself up if I let it.  Our lives are not guided by the thermodynamic principle of entropy;  a body, left to its own devices, often repairs itself.  If we stop picking at our wounds in an effort to get them to heal, maybe our lives can repair themselves too.

          As bad as my messy life is, I'm sure you feel like yours is worse, if only because you don't feel mine at all.  That's ok.  See, you're inevitable too.  You don't need to fight to go anywhere or to get out of anything.  You're already there.  Your mess is proof of that.  You may be going places, but those places have always been your own.  Unhappiness, uncertainty, and pain are not to be feared.  They are the harbingers of your future and they are here to help you.  Question is, are you ready to accept that, or do you need more help?

Hurry up and wait.

          Once upon a time, in my sophomore year of college, a girl liked me.  We'll call her Jill.  Jill was beautiful, smart, and fun.  I was overweight, smart, and awkward.  Long story short, I completely blew my chance.  Unfortunately for me, I did not blow my chance so hard as to preclude the possibility of having another one.  For months I hung on to the chance that I would be given another opportunity, long after all hope was lost.

          As bad as my initial failure was, the subsequent Purgatory was much worse.  Even knowing that there was absolutely nothing I could do to get Jill to go out with me, even knowing that it was direly necessary for my own wellbeing that I let go, I couldn't.  Despite being unable to do anything useful in the present, I could not give up the chance that the future might bring some new hope.

          Worse, I could do nothing that would damage this chance.  I had to put a stranglehold on my life, so that I wouldn't take any opportunities that might cause me to become unavailable to Jill.  I was miserable.

          Does this sound familiar?  Are you putting your life on hold for an opportunity that you know you can do nothing to bring about?  If so, then this is my advise to you;  stop it.  I know you're frightened.  I don't you don't want to risk throwing away all possibility of what you desire coming to pass.  But that possibility is a mirage.  It looks like life-sustaining water now, but once you get there it will just be more dry sand.

          Often, this type of mirage comes about because you failed the first time around and are waiting for a second go.  However, in the meantime you have done nothing to change or improve your methods.  Your intent is to simply do what you did before, but with more intensity.  This will not work.  The methods that failed before, will fail again.  What you really need to do is let go of this futile hope and allow yourself to grow.  Maybe then if the chance you were hoping for comes around again, you'll be ready.  But if you put all growth on hold so that you can remain the same person that got the opportunity before, failure is all but guaranteed.

          Eventually, I did let go of my hopes for Jill and myself.  This allowed me the opportunity to correct many of the things in myself that had caused me to fail so profoundly in the first place.  In a very real way, it changed my life.  I never did get another chance with her, but I don't regret it.  I let go, and in doing so I gained very much more than I lost.

          If there's nothing you can do, don't hold yourself back with the hopes that someday that may change.  Move on.  Even if the chance never roles around again, you won't regret what you lost.  You'll only regret what you never allowed yourself the opportunity to have.

What Time is it?

          What is time?  How can you tell that time is passing?  By motion.  Time isn't some mysterious vortex that the universe is swirling through, like in Dr. Who (or at least I don't think it is).  Time, as far as regular people are concerned, is the relative positioning of objects.  It is defined purely in terms of space.  Time passes because motion happens.  If all motion stopped time would no longer exist.

          Imagine that the universe was four balls arranged in a triangular pyramid.  Now imagine that one of the balls is moving away from the other three.  That is time.  What if that ball stopped moving away from the other three?  How could time exist without that motion?  There would be no way of referencing its passage.  It would cease to exist.  It's the same principle if you erased the fourth ball entirely.  Without it, there is no third dimension of space.  Without motion, there is no fourth dimension of space.

          So what does this have to do with you?  Well, if you're most people (and most of you are), then you are pursuing some form of increased happiness in the future.  If you strip that down, you are waiting for the world to move around a little bit before you can be happy.  Further stripped down, you are waiting for point A and point B to converge, while moving point C far enough away that it can't bother you.  Your life has become based on the movement of balls through space.  You have become convinced that your satisfaction in life is based on the specific relative positioning of nouns (people, places, things, and ideas).  You live with the hope that when points A and B converge, point D isn't going to fly in and knock them out of alignment.

          This, of course, is absurd.  You don't have enough hands to hold the whole alphabet, and inevitably you will be F'd in the A.  Happiness cannot be made a matter of intercept courses.  It's now, or never.  Fortunately for you, now is all the time anyone ever has.

I don't need you.

          In my previous blog post, I mentioned that I left my old self behind.  That's not entirely true.  I spent my first night in Chicago alone in my car, but after that a friend offered to house me for a while.  I had some misgivings about taking him up on it, but they seemed kind of crazy and there was no practical reason to decline.  Big mistake.

          It turns out that the person I left home to get away from came back with a vengeance once I had the comforts of running water and a bed.  My apathy has grown to its original dimensions, and my ability to discern what I should do next has been muddled in direct proportion.  I think that beds and showers, and the people they are offered by, are symbols in my mind of things that I am supposed to care about.  Not only am I supposed to care about these things, but it's almost criminal not to.  People simply will not accept that I do not need these things.

          The horror of apathy and muddled intuition are much greater than the discomfort of not having a bed to call my own, but when your horror is not able to be acknowledged by others while your discomfort is, it is the discomfort that takes precedent.  This, I think, is part of the core of what is wrong with people's lives.  There are the things that people really care about and want to do, and then there are the things that they have been taught are important.  You can't strive for both simultaneously.  They are anathema to each other, as I will explain.  In any given moment, you can only strive for one or the other.  Perhaps you have taught yourself to strive for one at certain instances, and the other the rest of the time, but it's still only one at a time.

          Think about the problems in your life that your days are consumed by.  If you run out of coffee filters and buy more, will it fulfill you as a person?  If your keys are locked in your car and you manage to get them out, will that be one of the culminating moments in your life?  If Aunt Bea and your Mother stop fighting over Grandma's inheritance, is your life made more meaningful?  These are the problems that consume the lives of the average person.  Problems that could not have a life-affirming resolution.  You could not possibly care in a deep way about getting more coffee filters.  But as long as you are pretending to care about the coffee filters, you make yourself utterly unable to actually enjoy your life and have any real experiences.  You're just a robot feeding a mechanical addiction to comforts and conveniences you don't need.

          That's not to say that these conveniences can't be a part of your life.  They just can't be where your focus is.  Once you have achieved focus on your real cares and desires, then you will seek the things you want for comfort, not in an effort to fulfill your life, but in an effort to improve it.  There's no point in opposing coffee filters or beds or showers, but if you don't need them then why worry about them?  Allow yourself to come to the point where coffee comes back into your life because it is so warm and delicious, not because it affirms your life.

          This is the trap I have allowed myself to fall into again.  I thought I had gotten away, and unconsciously my mind knew better than to ask for help, but once it was offered I couldn't resist because I couldn't think of words of refusal that would mean anything to the person that offered the help.  My friend would simply have been unable to allow himself to understand that I don't need or want these things from him, because then he would have had to understand the same about his own life.  This seems to me to be the largest barrier to being self-aware;  the inability to communicate with people who don't want to be made aware.  This requires that you overcome the largest comfort of all;  the comfort of being understood by others.

          What will I do?  I will leave here, just as I left home.  Courage will defeat apathy.  It is only a question of when.

This is not what we were meant for.

          I recently had occasion to spend a night in my car, having left my home in Minnesota for Chicago with little beyond the knowledge that I could not stay where I was any longer without fully committing myself to failure.  I left not just the physical location, but the psychology of who I had been made there.  I do not have any intentions of going back as the same person that I left as, so in a way I have left home forever.
          My first night was cold, lonely, and embarrassing.  I had parked in front of a CVS which was near to a Dunkin' Donuts and a police station, and the safety that implied.  It was raining.  I remember spending a portion at the beginning of the night with a dawning horror at what I had done and what I had to do.  I overcame this the same way that I overcame the apathy which had made this trip to Chicago necessary in the first place, and fell asleep at peace with what had come to pass.
          Early in the morning, well before the sun was up, I awoke.  Outside on the sidewalk was a  man.  He wasn't paying any attention to me, but my first instinct was to hunker down and hide the shame of my situation.  Then something occurred to me.

This is not what we were meant for.

          Humans were not born to fear their fellows in the streets.  We were not born to hide in our cars in fear and shame.  Guilt and embarrassment were never supposed to be our destinies.  Our lives, near as I can tell, are endlessly consumed by fear management.  We manage how we appear to our fellow man, how they feel about us, how we feel about them, and how they feel about each other.  We endlessly adhere to "their" standards, "they" being everyone and no one all at once.  And so we fear our comrades in this journey of life, for they can destroy us.  They need only jerk on one of the many strings we have attached to them, and suddenly a man on the street can unknowingly control the life and decisions of a boy in his car.
          But this system is not what we were born to uphold.  It has no power over us beyond the power we think we can gain from it.  I realized that all the power I could possibly gain from this system comes at the cost of being helpless against the men on the streets.  Instead of having control we are controlled, even down to our desires to control others.  We have been made slaves by that which was supposed to set us free, and I for one will have none of it anymore.  I have become tired of fearing men and what they can do to me, and even more what I can be made to do for them.  I am weary of the guilt which I have never learned to see without.  I have seen what is controlling me, and I understand why it is not good.  Can you see it too?
          That is my purpose in starting this blog.  I have seen the core of what humanity has become enslaved to, and it is not for the good of any or all that this control exists.  If you know that this core exists but do not know how it is controlling you, I am here to help you.  If you do not know that this core exists at all, I am here to enlighten you.  If you understand this core and all that it implies, I am here to learn from you.  Wherever I am and whatever I have become, it will never be too late.  I am meant for greatness, and so are you.