Turning a year older is decidedly one of the most difficult things that I have to endure this year. And it is not because I treat birthdays like a dirty laundry, like what most people do when they have renounce their youth. No, it is because it marks a point where I have to make significant decisions--and by God, these decisions are mighty hard. Countless sleepless nights have been spent on pondering, calibrating and weighing the factors for these decisions, and unfortunately the exercise has largely given birth to episodes of cognitive paralysis. Every decision is wrong. Every decision is right. Hard cases make bad laws, they say--I cannot agree more.
On balance, the decisions made (at the time of this writing) will whisk me away toward the altar of the pragmatic, the punishing and the industrious. Perhaps this is what people dub as "selling out". I mean, a sale is oft understood as an exchange of goods and services for monetary consideration. So, perhaps these decisions do constitute a sale, and by that logic, I sold out.
Nonetheless, I would argue that selling out ought not be associated with the derogatory, if not shaming, connotation that people tend to so draw when factoring the two. While it is perhaps wanting to seal working in a steel mill of an office as capable of feeding the soul of its nourishment, I would argue it is not altogether impossible or implausible. We are capable of synthesizing our own happiness--our own meaning--in spite of the fact these proclivities do not occur naturally to us. In fact, it is the very reason why we synthesize happiness and meaning to begin with. We are autotrophic beings, capable of nourishing ourselves and satisfying our needs--mental, spiritual, physical, emotional, intellectual. This act of synthesis is, I believe, a skill and a practice. We have to dare to do it, and we have to do it frequently enough to make it an integral part of our selves. Aren't repetition and synthesis the ways we teach our selves of our acquired tastes? How else do we teach our selves to relish the rubbery taste of vegetables, the bitterness of coffee, the inebriant consequences of alcohol, the pain of stretching, the love for reading, and many others? These are, I would argue, teachable skills.
It is futile, however, to defend against the argument that all this is merely self-talk, an exercise of intellectualizing the circumstances to a point where they became cognitively acceptable to us. It certainly is. Nevertheless, isn't the exercise of reason the only way that we deny ourselves of our baser instincts. Isn't reason the main driver of self-restriant, which by and large a desirable virtue? We employ reason to weigh the consequences of our decisions against our internalized set of moral values, and we seek to find comfort in the overlap between the two.
Even though I may bow down to the altar of the pragmatic, the merciless and the mundane, it does not necessarily mean that I will cease to be a seeker of meaning and purpose. Indeed, every second of me failing to squeeze an iota of meaning and purpose in living is a second squandered, a second spent in the face of pointlessness. I will never relinquish that as a mantra. However, I believe that there will be exactly that--meaning and purpose--somewhere along the road behind the seemingly suspect altar. There must be such. Otherwise, how else would the multitudes of sell-outs live their lives for ten, twenty, thirty or even forty years devoting their time, efforts and sacrifices before the said altar if all the gods and goddesses are completely false? There is something there--however obscure, however shrouded by soul-deadening appearances--that will quench the thirst of the soul. What one needs to have is the attitude to seek beyond the web of dreadfulness and social disapproval.
This is why I have to base the decisions on a well-thought-out reconciliation of where the line is to be drawn, in a manner that will make sense to me. It will inevitably a very fine line, which meanders left and right and around, and unless one takes my epistemic recognition of the circumstances, it will simply come across as either selfish, or conflicting, or unreasonable, or all the above. And it will be a great challenge to champion such paper-thin delineation of what is acceptable and what is not, and quite naturally, there will be slews of criticisms rushing in to poke holes on the carefully crafted contrivances. Perhaps, objectively speaking, such arbitrary ring-fencing is invariably indefensible.
What I have to tell myself when that happens--should it happen, when it happens--is to embrace myself with a great deal of self-friendship and to tell myself that they were the best decisions that I could make given the data that I could reasonably gather in the circumstances. Perhaps, just perhaps, the best consolation is this: "Most people are really doing the best they can. And that's just the reality. You have to give people credit for their humanity." And I pray that I will be blessed with sufficient self-friendliness to allow myself to stubbornly sing in the rain--and even more so, hopefully, in the storm.
