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.