The Search
There is a reasonable chance that the biggest thing you’ll take from this post is a complete banality.
It is the search for the biggest cliche in this post; that it is written in first person or that it is about a search for self.
Trite. I know.
Nevertheless, that may be enough to keep you engaged throughout – else with luck, and probably boredom on your part, you may take something of greater substance from this smattering of thoughts.
I have tired of stifling writing attempts because of a fear of producing uninteresting drivel. The truth is probably that the stated quest is as vain as it is fruitless.
To be successful, I must consider a post that I deem worthy of interest. This shouldn’t be too hard, you can imagine – the last post I clicked on in these internets was a picture of a winking stuffed cat being sodomised by yet another cat in the background of the present-day North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.
Yet, I would like to believe that I have a much more interesting message to convey and, subsequently, I leave the computer/pencil/paper stashed away while I procrastinate on my ridiculous ideas for stories. Telling myself all along that they would be great stories…if I would just get around to writing them.
I say vain because, really, even the most interesting post or story would serve no greater purpose than the occasional like and, much more frequent, spam post.
I cross my fingers that this post is the new birth of my writing prowess, hidden behind my laziness and near-addiction to Lifestyle Food.
Here goes:
For various reasons I have struggled to remember who I once thought I was. My god, it’s more trite than I had originally predicted but, I suppose, it is the truth. Relatively speaking, I thought I was a reasonably intelligent, confident person who could chat with most people and argue with the rest.
At an unknown junction this year I stopped, reflected, and realised that I was a stranger even to myself. I felt my memory had slipped, my knowledge was outrageously gap-filled and unfulfilled – even in important areas. Have I just spent the past few years disintegrating inside my own body, enduring a process too unremarkable as to unnoticed within my own being.
Friends have slipped, hobbies have disappeared. I sit at a point where I must reclaim myself, even if what I real mean is mynewself.
I am enjoying a process of attempting to grow my brain – yet I fear that years of Facebook and channel switching have rendered my brain useless to the actual recollection of any new information. Hyperlinks in my mind run to blank pages as the new esoteric terms of any given field I choose to “study” build up into a cloud of confusion, frustration, self-doubt and tiredness.
The problem I am encountering, embracing, is the true idea of the self. (HA, Bullshit I know, truly I am sorry).
But hear me out, if you’re bored. I don’t believe in the self at present. I simply cannot connect the dots between the person I was a decade ago and the person I am now.
I can approach the exact same situation in two different days for two polar opposite results – obviously the discussion of the impossibility of two exact situations occurring is a rich one, it is not meant for this post.
Photos of myself illicit your typical thoughts. “Oh I was so young,” (what the hell?) others include “child” and the strange “why did I have blonde hair and no longer do?” Here is a symbol for my present confusion.
I already have a poor memory of my childhood. Little is recalled and the bits that remain would rather be forgotten. But if I cannot even identify with physical characteristics, how can I truly believe I am a product of what I have been?
Nature vs nurture has long been a topic of fascination for me – though I am inclined to think it is both or neither, or some combination of those two.
My adult life has not followed the path one would have predicted all those years ago, yet even my present “self” lacks continuity.
Of thought. Of action. Of deed.
I have long harboured ambitions to help others. Yet fail to do so. I shake my head at the woes of the world but willingly bury my head in mediocre pastimes such as sport or an attempted appreciation of music. I say attempted because, honestly, in the age of Spotify I feel like I can listen to bands for an hour with no idea who any of them are, without a connection to a single lyric.
Yet I sit, transfixed, for hours on end. Entranced by the chords and notes, lyrics and melodies of men and women and others that I will never meet or thank.
I feel in a way that my passions have subsided. Fierce arguments used to brew within my very soul, intense desire to be learn, be heard. Prove myself.
Now there is a calmness to my being that I certainly do not recognise and it carries unwelcome baggage. A sense that I cannot connect ideas as I once found so easy. That I do not harbour the same passions for fairness, opportunity, equal rights and hope for all.
Maybe I needed the calmness to clear safely into my next chapter? Maybe this is just a more elaborate ploy for procrastination?
It is a bind of the mind – we are not our actions yet without actions we are nothing. I don’t think I can ever truly know who I am because, from one moment to the next, I don’t believe I am the same. Even at a cellular level, I am not who I was 7 years ago. Emotionally, physically and philosophically I do not think I have to go back nearly this far.
Perhaps the realisation is that I never actually understood any part of who I was at any given moment, hiding instead behind a caustic tongue and often a trumped-up yet nonetheless base-level of knowledge.
Calmness may just be that, in that given moment, I know who I am. Uncertainty is who that person will be.
The search continues.
Western introspection
I like to blame my lack of creativity (laziness) on outside factors. While I enjoy putting ink to paper – or in this case finger to glass screen – it is an art I seldom engage in.
It is an expression of thought that I would partake in more often if it weren’t for the lures of my surroundings. Invariably, writing leads me to think introspectively. I suppose, by its very nature, that is a natural occurrence. Yet, Angry Birds, Two and a Half Men and the football each (in their own way, time and place) lead me away from engaging with my active brain and instead into a mind-numbing abyss of Western life.
That’s not to say I don’t engage the foibles of Western life. If given the choice between a walk through the wilderness or a day on the couch it’d be the latter that would win – but I would still mope about the decision.
This blog serves as yet another vessel to impart blame on factors outside myself – so here I will unashamedly follow that path.
It seems important to actively engage with the world, with others – to improve oneself continually (through the vehicle of a book or a treadmill) yet I seem engrossed by the notion of plateauing. I will happily spend evenings with friends discussing movies I haven’t seen, books I never got through or films I’ve only heard about. Apparently, it is of no consequence to many whether you are a person of substance or hot air.
History is something I love. I delight in uncovering lost mysteries or characters – yet would go only so far as to read a Wikipedia page to learn about a civilization, never the library. I suppose I’m a product of my time (lazy). It is of greater consequence that I garner a general feel for a large amount of subject matter, to get me through a conversation with a stranger say, rather than know something as well as I should know myself. To learn, to grow.
Perhaps it’s a jaded view. We live in a time surrounded by easy answers. To cooking recipes, to mathematical quandaries, to the winner of 2010’s Masterchef, to the name of the Southern General in the American civil way. Yet, I’m not sure my mind has evolved to be able to grasp such information. That, whilst I enjoy learning and discovering things I had not previously known, I feel inundated by how much I do not know.
It’s the pop-culture, Gen-whatever view of the world which I feel detached from yet formed by. I feel I can not read a novel on existentialism when I could use that time to learn about the fall of the Berlin wall. Incidentally, I’m brought back to my childhood. To a time where a would know two shows were on at the same time and not knowing which to view. Torn between my love of watching the Simpsons and finishing that episode of Home and Away (I didn’t particularly care which I watched, and minutes later wouldn’t remember to switch channels anyway). I am seduced by knowing that something else is there, to be consumed, studied, viewed or indulged.
Essentially, whatever the subject matter may be, I feel the knowledge of these subjects doesn’t matter so much anymore. It is a habit. A habit of the time and the ease of the technological age. A habit unique in the history of human history to the peoples of the previous 20 years in the Western world.
There are places, within these spaces that people still go to reside in, however. I feel it is a way of people bringing normality into a universe that still makes little sense. Forums and Facebook are two sites that achieve this purpose in my opinion. While there are millions of sites on the web, there are only 12 in my favourites, 10 of them are sporting ones. Within these spaces, I can gravitate towards the creation of an identity and the withdrawal of information that I want – scores and stats mostly. In these spaces I don’t need to know everything, I am familiar with the domains, the content (how to explore it) and these occupy too much of my time (perhaps for that reason).
I am involuntarily, yet transfixedly, drawn to the need to know everything. Yet whatever we do, whatever we eat may kill us. Knowledge is power but knowledge lies beyond the grasp of those who have been raised in the technological age, those who believe all achievement lies within a google search, to those who care not for human engagement.
In the end – I think you’ve got to search for whatever answers you need, back yourself to be interested in what you think will enrich your life. Beyond that
I’m a mess.
stretching into infinity 