For a decent chunk of the last 10 or so years, I've been concentrating on all the wrong things. No, I don't just mean the boozing and chasing the latest exciting trend but missing the mark wildly on the latter and meeting resounding success on the former. No, I mean that I've been way too abstract and analytical. And it took me some time, but I've come to the conclusion that I cannot care about big ideas so much. They don't matter. What matters is informed by what's in front of you, and how you do or don't yearn to enjoy your life, to inhabit the space that exists, in other words, instead of chasing that which is opaque and fuzzy. The opaque and fuzzy is often justification for selfish behavior anyway, and selfish behavior is, for me, short term and destructive, i.e., I tell myself I'm doing things for the sake of big notions and then act like a 7 year old. And the opaque and fuzzy isn't very exciting. I reject that idea that that which is near is superficial, as well. It isn't. It is just available, and available and unnecessary are different. Too much of my relatively recent life has gone by with me as a spectator instead of submerged.
And I haven't expressed as clearly what I mean, except to say that I can't exactly live my life burdened with all the knowledge of how things work, all the time. Instead, most of the time, I just want to interact with those things, much more intuitively. I want less logic and formalizing and distance and more emotional engagement and feelings of home and accessibility of myself to myself, if that makes sense. Instead of walking around in a fog. I don't think there will be such severe costs to this, while I do think the benefits will be notable, as I've already seen.
2 comments:
This. I feel like this all the time, but I've never been able to express it like you just did. And I'm having a hard time unburdening myself. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you, that's very nice.
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