24

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.

Whittaker Advice

Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps have never attempted living in the first place. The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one's own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity--for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one's eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.  

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Praise be the labors that lie before me. Let us begin. 

Grand

Understood

Her Look Of "Hopeless Beauty"

"It's clear that she's poor," he says. "Her face is dirty, her garment is ripped, yet she has a sort of dignity and confidence and fortitude. In her eyes, I suppose you could sense that there was something troubling her, something not quite right. She's seen more than she should at such a young age. Her village had been bombed and her relatives killed and she'd had to make this two-week trek through the mountains to the refugee camp."

Get Back To Work

I have a friend who’s an Italian filmmaker of great artistic sensibility. After years of struggling to get his films made, he sent an anguished letter to his hero, the brilliant (and perhaps half-insane) German filmmaker Werner Herzog. My friend complained about how difficult it is these days to be an independent filmmaker, how hard it is to find government arts grants, how the audiences have all been ruined by Hollywood and how the world has lost its taste…etc, etc. Herzog wrote back a personal letter to my friend that essentially ran along these lines: “Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you have to, but stop whining and get back to work.” I repeat those words back to myself whenever I start to feel resentful, entitled, competitive or unappreciated with regard to my writing: “It’s not the world’s fault that you want to be an artist…now get back to work.”  Always, at the end of the day, the important thing is only and always that: Get back to work. This is a path for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.

Positive Intention

Every behavior has a positive intention, I was told. I've been trying to practice this as much as possible since the day I read it. And I totally get it. At the end of the day we are just imperfect human beings chained (perhaps biologically) to our own lofty and rosy ideals, whose dimensions stretch so widely that the corners are almost always beyond reach--no matter how hard we stretch our fingers. The resulting discomfort then brews uncontrollably underneath, beneath the skin-deep chivalry that is too fragile and too permeable to hold anything in. We helplessly discharge the discomfort on the world, hoping that at the very least we have the swordsmanship to perform the task elegantly. We know that words cut--and they cut deeply--and that there is no armor donned by the most chivalrous among us that can fend off the cavalier performance. That is why we strive to strike with elegance. Alas, even at that there is little saving grace, notwithstanding how adroitly we engage in verbal gymnastics, we cannot reach those corners of ourselves that our minds and confidence have falsely constructed. The elegance is simply inelegant. However, few of us see that. Ultimately, in spite of our blindness we shake our discomfort so reflexively because, unfortunately, we shake our discomfort helplessly. If this is so, then what is to be done by our unfortunate listener, clad in an armor too frail and too permeable to shield him from the incisive words of his helpless counterpart--knowing that the latter is just painfully trying to stretch the fingers to reach the frontiers of the widely stretched ideals. There is positive intention behind the behavior, and it is hard to practice it.