All good things are simple and free.
Monday, June 8, 2015
8 June 2015
Found as a draft from 2010:
So if I've learned anything over the last year, it is that inspiration is very hard to come by. Really, it's next to impossible if you're looking for it. Nothing is easy if you want it. If you need inspiration, what you really need is to do something about it. It doesn't come to you, YOU have got to go to it. So, with a total lack of inspiration, I write. I write to remind myself of what I love doing. I write to light a fire under my ass. I write because it's something I'm good at doing. I'm writing to inspire. Myself, namely and if I could get a few others along the way, then even better. Life is a damned short rope and you shouldn't climb an inch without the fire of life in your eyes. You've got to find what lights that burning passion to live. Find your fire so when you reach the end of your rope, you can let go peacefully and smile as you fall.
Found as a draft from 2010:
So if I've learned anything over the last year, it is that inspiration is very hard to come by. Really, it's next to impossible if you're looking for it. Nothing is easy if you want it. If you need inspiration, what you really need is to do something about it. It doesn't come to you, YOU have got to go to it. So, with a total lack of inspiration, I write. I write to remind myself of what I love doing. I write to light a fire under my ass. I write because it's something I'm good at doing. I'm writing to inspire. Myself, namely and if I could get a few others along the way, then even better. Life is a damned short rope and you shouldn't climb an inch without the fire of life in your eyes. You've got to find what lights that burning passion to live. Find your fire so when you reach the end of your rope, you can let go peacefully and smile as you fall.
It's a strange thing, paradoxical even, but I never would have figured any of this out if I didn't have such an inspiration-less year. It wasn't a total loss, I did travel overseas for the first time but I came home with more questions than I did answers. Which confused me. You're supposed to gain clarity when you travel, or so I thought. And I did have my moments of clarity, like when I saw Machu Picchu and silently cried behind my sunglasses because I knew so many people I loved would never get to see the beauty I was seeing. Or when I was on the bus heading back from the Sacred Valley and I looked out the windows upon the pink-hued mountains of the Andean twilight, only to be overwhelmed with the view before me. It was in those moments that I knew I needed to see more. I needed more of Peru. I needed more of South America. I needed more of my own country. I just needed more of the world. But I came home puzzled. I was confused as to why the internship proved to me that I didn't want to make a living out of something I had invested so much time into. I was confident that I wanted to be a bioarchaeologist. I spent so much time making myself the best student of bioarchaeology a professor could ask for. I spent even more time convincing my parents that it was my calling. Then I went into the field and found myself indifferent. I lost interest in something I had been so passionate about. I lost any inspiration I may have had up to that point. I left Peru knowing I had a different calling but I had no idea what that calling was.
Now, as I string together words the best way I know how, I realize something rather fundamental. We all want to be happy. Everything we do is done to achieve something that will ultimately work to make us happy. But it is the means by which we achieve our happiness that makes us unique. Inspiration comes, inspiration goes but we must never forget what we are ultimately looking for. We are born with a little piece of our being missing and everything we do in life is done in an attempt to find the missing piece. The happiness that makes life worth living is within this proverbial missing part and once found, we can live the life we were meant to have.
Monday, April 4, 2011
The human life is really a strange thing. We are born. Then most people on Earth (maybe just some, I don't know) spend the next two decades or so sitting and listening to other humans tell them things, things that in most cases will be forgotten and in most of those cases it won't matter if they flutter away to the spider-webby, dusty basement of the human brain. Then a lot of those people will take on work that will earn them as many rectangular-shaped pieces of cotton paper as they can get. Then they die. I mean there's a good amount of filler to make it more interesting--sex is great but has a reputation for causing problems, love can be beautiful until you throw human nature in the mix. I guess life is really just about the filler.
So...
How does one make some good filling?
Love: Since it's truly a dumb idea to try and find love, maybe I should actually let love find me. I need to open myself up (not literally) to more people; crazy things like love lurk in the dark corners you never expect them to be in. I should probably stop giving so much thought as to what could happen and relish in what is actually happening, as horribly mundane as it may be. Like the fact that I'm sitting here, in a warm yet supremely uncomfortable bed, using this rather complicated brain I have to make marks that translate at least a bit of what I feel and think. (The ability to read and write, really language in all its forms, is a mind-blowing phenomenon...sure these words look familiar to speakers of the English language and can at least be sounded out by speakers of some other languages but really, they're just a bunch of scribbles that make sense to 0.00000000000000001% of the universe.) Either way, I'm here right now, could be gone two seconds from now and in the grand scheme of things, my nearly twenty-one years of life had about as much of an effect on the universe as a particle of dirt stuck to an African elephant's ass. With that said, it'd probably be smart idea to love good and hard because you never know when the big tail is going to swing around and flick you off into non-existence.
Happiness: It's easy to think of things that make you happy. Sex (done right) makes me incredibly happy. Love (also done right or, at least the best way we know how) can also make me happy. But you can't have sex twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week (it almost wouldn't be fair if life were that good) so I (you can too) need to figure out other that make me (you) happy; to fill in the spaces between loving and fucking.
So now I'm back to figuring out what makes me happy. I suppose life really is about the pursuit of happiness. It's the pursuit that's the filler anyways.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
I want to write, but I don't know what I want to write of. I would like to write of everything I know and maybe even what I don't know but I'm not sure its possible for one person to do this. But I still want to write, so I suppose I'll just start with what I know.
One thing I know is that life isn't easy. Not even close. But that doesn't mean its not worth living every second you're allowed. Life is hard (I would say nasty, brutish, and short but that would be plagiarism and I think Mr. Hobbes was in a pretty dark period in his life when he wrote that anyways) and living in today's world isnt the easiest thing to do. But really, life wouldn't be all that interesting if it were easy. If everything went according to plan and those neat little scenarios we create in our minds actually played out, our lives would be like giant balls of sunshine that piss and shit rainbows and unicorns and bunnies and daisies. It would be fun for approximately fifteen minutes but beyond that it would just be frigging annoying. I figured out life wasn't easy awhile ago, but I just recently realized that I knew this. That's another thing I know. You can know something without even knowing you know it. Sometimes you hit the sandpaper side of life and you learn something, but too often you don't even realize you've learned it until its too late. You have this new information, a new idea stored away in one of the lobes of your brain (that's one of the things I don't know) and if you had this something at your disposal say months before you figured out you knew it, you may have been able to cut yourself a bit of a break. But that's not how living goes. It's not easy but its the only time we have.
Another thing I know is that love and relationships make living life look like pie. Love is not even remotely easy. And love itself doesn't stink, its the trying to fall in love and then falling out of love that creates the problems. The other problem is that "love" is a REALLY broad term. It lends itself to literally millions of definitions. Everybody thinks of love differently. We all know this thing called love exists because our brains have been hotwired for it. But we all have different ideas when it comes to love and since I'm not a mind reader, I can only give my best interpretation. This is what I know of love:
One thing I know is that life isn't easy. Not even close. But that doesn't mean its not worth living every second you're allowed. Life is hard (I would say nasty, brutish, and short but that would be plagiarism and I think Mr. Hobbes was in a pretty dark period in his life when he wrote that anyways) and living in today's world isnt the easiest thing to do. But really, life wouldn't be all that interesting if it were easy. If everything went according to plan and those neat little scenarios we create in our minds actually played out, our lives would be like giant balls of sunshine that piss and shit rainbows and unicorns and bunnies and daisies. It would be fun for approximately fifteen minutes but beyond that it would just be frigging annoying. I figured out life wasn't easy awhile ago, but I just recently realized that I knew this. That's another thing I know. You can know something without even knowing you know it. Sometimes you hit the sandpaper side of life and you learn something, but too often you don't even realize you've learned it until its too late. You have this new information, a new idea stored away in one of the lobes of your brain (that's one of the things I don't know) and if you had this something at your disposal say months before you figured out you knew it, you may have been able to cut yourself a bit of a break. But that's not how living goes. It's not easy but its the only time we have.
Another thing I know is that love and relationships make living life look like pie. Love is not even remotely easy. And love itself doesn't stink, its the trying to fall in love and then falling out of love that creates the problems. The other problem is that "love" is a REALLY broad term. It lends itself to literally millions of definitions. Everybody thinks of love differently. We all know this thing called love exists because our brains have been hotwired for it. But we all have different ideas when it comes to love and since I'm not a mind reader, I can only give my best interpretation. This is what I know of love:
Love creates and love destroys. Love fulfills and love empties. Love gives and love takes. Love creates life, love fulfills life and love gives life. But love can also destroy life, empty life and take life. Love is a paradox and anyone brave enough to face love without reservation deserves it more than those who are afraid of it. Love is a willingness without conditions; it is action without understanding.
That's it. That's the most I can tell because that's all I'm very sure of. And you can only be sure of things through alot of experience. I've seen love do all those things. The only thing I've never seen love do is hide. A love that is real and beautifully raw simply cannot hide. Maybe that is what makes it so complicated and frightening, yet so irresistibly wanted. It's the unashamed paradox of the human condition.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
