Be Here Now

Does it mean to be placid?  To forget about the assholes, the half-brain tail-gating you into the red light-filled intersection?  Does it mean that you should forget?  Be walked over?  Grow humility like other men grow balls?  Find a way to consistently turn, aggressively turn, away, behind, upside down?  Does it mean that you should forgive everything?

Or does it mean that you should purposefully castrate the planning mechanism in your brain, forget about causality and effort and strife and become learnedly helpless, but calm in that sea of non-regret, finding a paddle too much effort, because the concept of a future would be too heavy a burden to bear?

Perhaps it means a kind of non-thought.  A sucking up the pieces and molting them into a new skin kind of thought, a meta-metamorphosis, one that consumes so fully so as to invert, to churn into, and transform the utterly alien into acceptably prosaic, the banal into a kind of mystic glitter?

Whatever it is, I wonder, and spit, and keep on walking, looking only so long at the river as possible before going off to class, piecing together the fragments of myself from high school into college, wondering how those cool academics could be so goddamn cool, and emulating them with the kind of obsessive force that meant I'd do whatever it was they thought I should do, even and especially if it involved iterations of being here, now--or then.

Figuring It Out

For me, there have been many false sureties, times when I found what it all meant, and that I could be relatively secure in that knowledge, regardless of "what else" might be.

Having gone through many iterations of my "world view" and built upon and destroyed it even more, I can say for sure that nothing is certain.

Given that, I'd like to proffer a way of being: doubt.  I'd like us to doubt more.  I'd especially like us to doubt that which we are certain about, even and especially when we doubt other people and their capacity, viewpoint, or their certainty.  We may be right.  But in all likelihood we are at least partially wrong, and being partially wrong means the capacity to self-correct, to take in new information, and to all-around keep growing.  That's sort of the important structural element here: growth.  It doesn't have to be perfect and it doesn't have to be all or nothing.  It can't be, in fact.  But it is important that growth remains possible.

And certainty can actually retard growth.   Even as I write this I doubt.  For instance, perhaps doubt can retard growth, too!  And, well, that's true.  There's no sure and fast way forward, much as there is very little certainty about what forward might mean.  Forward is the start and stop, the correction, the reapplication, and the resolve to keep doing it for no other purpose than to experiment.

Don't Give Up! <> Be Realistic?

I'm not sure which one wins the day, either in the short or long run.

To temper the tension, I'd advise myself to both not give up and be realistic.

But what about when being realistic means giving up, by definition?

If you don't have unrealistic expectations, you won't be let down!

Such folk wisdom!~  Who ever said that I would be in control of my own expectations.

Seriously, most of these sayings are grounded in the idea that we have the capacity to control ourselves!  What a fanciful notion.

Still, what if we could control our emotional selves.  Which would be better?  Not giving up, or being realistic?

Which one wins, more often?

Which one wins, more often, for you/x individual?

For those that win, can we be sure that the motto was adhered to in its entirety?

I'm guessing that small level adjustments are made all the time.  But I could be wrong.  I've certainly been exposed to a lot of people that are inflexible, and guess what: their inflexibility works.  For instance, and especially, imagine some negotiation.  Even though it might not be where you want to end up, you take a certain stance precisely because you know that you will have to compromise eventually.,,  you basically bake in that assumption to your stance.  So taken on its own, you don't subscribe to what you're saying.  But taken in the expected context of other people's strategies, your strategy makes sense.

Except that they are doing the same thing: strategizing based on your expected strategy.   What if both sides started at where they wanted to end up?  Then they definitely wouldn't end up where they wanted!  So it makes sense to be extreme, given any antagonistic system.

Perhaps it also makes sense in the personal emotional realm?  For all the fanfare that "giving up the right way" -- "failing well" yields these days in ultra data policy making/personal decision making, perhaps it still makes sense to set expectations unrealistically to get where  you "really" want to be in the end.

Just makes sense to somehow remember where  you really wanted to be, when the time comes to accept something/or keep arguing.

And that part is difficult.

All Garbage?

Imagine the worst: that your life is mostly worthless.  That you've tried incredibly hard, and that all of the effort has been rolled up into a bunch of mulch. Imagine all of the things that you deeply fear--that you fear so much you can barely conjure them  (that you are alone, in a fundamental and irreconcilable way; that the people you hold closest to you don't value you; that you are suspended in one state of career stagnation; that nothing ever changes and gets better; that shame permeates your soul).  Just let those thoughts consume you momentarily.  That you cannot control who you are.  That you lose your faculties of recognition.  That your most precious memories slowly lose their details.

Now imagine the best: that somehow, despite fuck ups and mistakes, you have not alienated everybody dear to you; that your effort has landed somewhere, and that people recognize you, and come to you for advice.  That your family loves you and looks forward to spending time with you, and that you have balanced successfully most of your needs.  Imagine that you largely control where your life goes, and that, realizing this, you made a point to be purposeful and that you have taken pride in what you can accomplish.  Imagine that brand of genuine self-respect these things can produce, that way that it infuses you and makes you stronger.

Imagine that you can be okay with your limitations.  At peace.  Without the need to prove it, or anything.

Stupider, Less Important, and Far Uglier

We sure are a delusional folk.  Outside of the exceptionalism lathered into a foamy mess, the bionic fun-house mirror funk of greediness, and the self-justification route preferred by all (and not programmed into GPS, yet), we might imagine a more real reality.  In that more real reality there is a world where we are seen as other see us: stupider, less important, and far uglier.

Which is a good touchstone for today's lesson: don't act like you're smart, important, and pretty.  In all likelihood, you are not.

Don't despair!

Oh, there I go again, diving us all into a cesspool of depression.  That was not my intention.  In fact, my intention is to divorce the idea of intelligence and status and looks from decision-making.  Because those three things don't bring happiness, and concentrating on those things is purely distracting, in the most banal and superficially serious way.  Chasing after happy endings through the ghost of foggy mirrors!

Anyway, the point is that letting go of all that seems incredibly important in regards to looks and intelligence and status will actually free you to do what it is you might enjoy doing without worrying about how what you enjoy makes you unpopular, or whatever, uglier.  

Those things have no control over you if they have no control over you.

Stop Drinking Now = Learning a New Language

Listen, when you don't know something, it seems incredibly mysterious.  Think about traveling in a foreign country where you don't even know how to say "please", "hello", or "thank you."  It is incredibly frustrating.  Not only that but the language seems mind-bogglingly complex.  Right?

Yes.

And so, it seems like you might learn some of the language, and in the process, that somehow you will swallow the mind-boggling complexity, and subsume it as part of you, and then feel good about it.  I'm not knocking language learning at all, but the truth is that as you learn a language, hearing it seems less and less mysterious and more and more normal.  That makes sense if you consider that language is a form of communication.  And communication is functional (even if esoterically so at times, like with subtext and all).  And so, it isn't that the language is incredibly mysterious.  It is that your knowledge of that structure was zero, mostly.  And as you go from zero upward, well, intriguing, and challenging, and constantly there, but not quite as mysterious.

Sobriety is the same.  It is a wonder, a kind of language in itself.  It takes getting used to.  In conceptual terms only, it is special and mysterious and even hard to see the contours of it, how they might apply to you.  And like a language, it takes a lot of time to learn.  And like a language, you get better with more practice.  And time, therefore.  And patience.

And like a language, it allows you to communicate with other people, to understand a set of standards that were previously invisible.

Magic

I meant to write this "in the moment."

I was feeling slightly--albeit ever so slightly--magical.  There was a sense of promise.  A whiff of nostalgia mixed in with the possibility of change, the connection to something larger.  The awe-inspiring performance of total immersion in an activity.

Anyway, I don't often feel this way.  Lately I've been getting better, though, having more frequent "high consistent energy" type days.   I've been sleeping consistently too, that is, not waking up at night as much as I used to.  I've been eating less.  I have control over my hunger.  For the first time in a long long time.  A little bit of honest control.  Not to brutal ends, no.  To moderate ones.  I've been out of control, quite literally, for many years.

I like to aim toward poise.  I don't think it didactic or excessive or wrong.  I respect poise.  I respect restrained intelligence.  I respect people who firmly know when they don't know and aggressively pursue.  I want to be like that more often.  I don't think it is bad to aim toward betterment of self, to change oneself, and to blossom into something new.  Consistency is in some regards quite over-rated, when it, for instance, keeps people blinded, when they feel like they have to "keep it real" and stay emotionally immature, act out, or do other inane shit to basically signal their capacity to exhibit normal social behavior for a particular group.  I say show yourself as someone who is striving to be better.  There's nothing wrong with that.  That's not a reason to feel shame.  Anyone who wants to make you feel shame for that shouldn't be allowed "in" emotionally.  People should feel shame for abusing their wives, for manipulating a benefits system, or even for not pushing themselves.  They shouldn't feel it for true effort.

I'm convinced that sustained and true effort and magic are strongly related.

Hope

Hope is a very delicate thing.  It is hard to quantify and easy to abuse and quite possibly dangerous to harbor.  It deludes us at times, and we are wont to use it as a tool for staying deluded.

And yet we need it.

Without it, I'm fairly sure that I would perish.

And yet it is hard to keep up, to hold out.

Allowing your hope to fill a previously empty structure, that is, shifting goals and moving on, but still maintaining hope, is a delicate dance.

Gaining Perspective (Easy To Be Locked In Without Realizing It)

I suppose the most pernicious thing about alcohol, exempting the physical and immediate behavioral nastiness of it, is really, like a good friend once said, its ability to lock you into a loop, to make it very hard, in other words, to take in new information, feedback about your work (or romantic life), and to make corrections.

Even without alcohol, making changes to oneself are often hard and oftener just not very likely.  We don't say we don't know or that we're sorry easily, but perhaps we should.

Instead, I constantly hear:

a) outraged people

b) people who know the best

c) people complaining about other people and how stupid they are (implicit message is not that clever guys)

Come away from any awkward conflict-type situation, and you, too (and me) will most likely try to justify your actions, and paint the other person's actions with thick nasty old paint.  Regardless of reality.

Add alcohol to that mix, and all of a sudden, you might as well not be curious about anything, because you know everything, and all of your intuition is 100% accurate all the time.  Not only that, but fuck people who disagree, right?

Am I right or wrong here?

So anyway, understanding that a) the world is vastly more complex than we can hope to understand and b) lots of things cannot therefore be assigned causal arrows, particularly our own actions, and that c) alcohol diminishes our already quite small capacity to fully comprehend (a) and (b), well, the only thing left to do is drop out alcohol and work hard to correct previously blocked feedback.  And even then it will be quite difficult.  Because we alcoholics, once sober, will want very badly to find meaning, even or especially easy meaning, the kind we are used to.  But meaning finding isn't easy.