11 - The Silent Surrender

Hey there, Walking Buddy. Come here a moment, and sit down before we walk on any further just yet.

Sometimes it's nice to just sit and talk for awhile.

I want to bring you where I've been spending time lately, to stand by me on the shore in my mind where I have been visiting whenever no one else was around, trickling sand out of my fist and contemplating the minuscule crystals of it as they fall. Listening to the quiet waves.

By the way, did you know that THIS IS WHAT SAND LOOKS LIKE when magnified?
On the beach, we crush between our toes a hundred thousand tiny gems. Beauty unseen, unsung.

I've been thinking existential thoughts about what Life truly is, and how all it seems to be remains limited by our ability to perceive. It's all very high-handed and theoretical, and I am terribly certain I haven't the philosophical background to even know exactly what it is I'm thinking about, even as I am thinking it. I may actually be just sitting here thinking thoughts meant to seem deep, perhaps looking to impress myself; my subconscious may be angling for a promotion or something. It's hard to be sure. Should you be curious, however, here are my thoughts of the past few days as clearly as I can explain them:

Life isn't really about anything that we don't deliberately make it about. For most of us on the average day, that tends to lazily mean our lives end up being about the casual, everyday problems and situations we encounter on that day... the day is bad because the car wouldn't start, because we ran late for work and the traffic lights betwixt there and here were not aligned to our passage in fortunate fashion. It's all reactive. And that's not necessarily a bad thing all the time! We live our lives reacting only to the things which concern us, when what we are truly doing is conserving mental and physical energy: always keeping a stockpile in case something really difficult should arise unexpectedly. But in approaching Life this way, we are unintentionally allowing Life to decide what our days will be, rather than our own wills, our own desires, our own spirits.

We look at others who choose to tackle Life head-on, and by and large (I know this was true for me personally, for a long time, at least) we think Good lord, what an exhausting prospect, living that way. We look at the overachievers and shake our heads. We look upon driven people and privately admit that we find the idea of facing Life, spending that extra energy without an immediate threat motivating the expenditure, without the comfortable blameless simplicity of reactivity powering the decision (a person can never be blamed for something they only reacted to, after all, not in the same way they can for something they willfully made happen), it all seems frankly just illogical at first glance. And I think that we are wrong to think so; examined more closely, it is intensely logical to face one's Life actively rather than reactively.

Why not face Life with a cocky grin, body and mind at the ready?

One of my personal beliefs is that a life spent only in conservation of energy is a life spent living in mild, lukewarm fear. A life spent wasting that energy, going to sleep every night with the majority of it unspent and ready to recharge from 92% back to full capacity, and with it the lion's share of the potential inherent in that life lies unspent in tandem. Living in casual fear of the rainy day, the one bad phone call, the angry customer at work. Always saving and stockpiling your strength and potential toward the fear of that moment coming and finding you tired. Not incapable, mind you, not exhausted and unable... merely already a bit tired.

And therein lies the trap of thinking and living in this way, in my opinion. We do not prepare against the idea of being already exhausted when disaster strikes; whether we want to admit it or not, the majority of us live relatively calm lives, touched daily by neither extreme exhaustion nor terrible disaster in any form. And in that realization lies the sad truth: we prepare every single day, limit ourselves, and look upon those who are living better and more actively with sheeplike incomprehension of the wolf, not because we are afraid of demons, but of imps... small, weak things. The woes we hold ourselves back every day to be utterly ready to defend against and defeat the moment they arise are more rawr than roar, and when we bow to the mere possibility of their coming we make ourselves much the same. This is the ultimate reward for living reactively. You become as small or large as the demons you regularly fight, and most of us instinctively choose only the smallest of demons to focus upon every day.

And in this way, we become less than we could be.

And talk about irony! In always holding back, always minimizing controllable risk in case of the worst even as our perception of what "worst" should mean invisibly shrinks within our minds, we only ever grow less capable of handling anything large if and when it should arise! Like a bodybuilder who never lifts heavier weights, but only ever continues to lift the same 5lb. dumbbells all day, every day. Sure, he's fit as hell to handle those 5lb. weights, but then along comes a bit of 200lb. cancer sauntering into the gym, into the life of someone you're close to and know well and love, and all of a sudden you're a wreck! Because you were not ready. You allowed Life to lull you. You have allowed Life to dictate for you, as though you haven't the brainpower to handle those duties daily yourself when the truth is you only just couldn't be bothered to use it when you didn't have to. You have failed to train yourself, and now you're being deployed directly to war. Good luck surviving, hero.

He who doesn't train his mind, dulls his mind. Now think of how many dullards you know.

People throughout my life have asked me variations of questions that all boil down to the essence of "Why do you bother to think that deeply about -insert concept here-? It's a simple idea - he likes her. She doesn't feel the same way. End of story." To which I am invariably driven to explain that no, the situation involves humans, so out of all the things it could possibly be I can assure you simple is not one of them. He likes her, yes. She holds back, yes. But she also likes him. She is just more afraid of X than she is allured by Y at this juncture, and with a clear broad-spectrum understanding of those factors, one can realize that this situation isn't remotely simple, it's the opening act to a tale of intriguing romantic potential. Almost as frequent is a half-impressed, half-incredulous "Wow, it must be exhausting to live that way." Most of these comments are in response to some conversation wherein I have attempted to explain how I see some particular thing or came to the piece of advice I just offered, which inevitably leads to a request for more explanation, and can sometimes organically lead to an admission that yes, I actually see everything around me as a multi-floored deep sub-basement of conceptual layers and likely causality broken down by individual issue and separate concept, all the time. My answer to these questions and observations is always the same: "I chose to live this way when I chose to believe that I was made to do great and unique things, and I will need to be sharpened to a razor-edge to have the greatest chance of success." Unless I don't know the person all that well, in which case I often give them a no-less-true-but-not-the-whole-truth answer of, "It isn't exactly a choice for me. I see what I see, and am who I am as a result of that."

This isn't entirely a choice for me, so please don't mistake what I said above as an arrogant admonishment to anyone else with a subtext of "if you were all weird like me, automatically no one would ever be afraid of anything, ever," because that's absolutely not true. But there is a degree of choice in everything that I do. Where I keep my focus. What I turn the laser of my perception upon, and how long I keep it there. What lengths I will go to in order to self-improve. What I see is what I do not control, and that is what can give me ideas of what to do... but what I actually do remains my own demesne, completely within my sphere of choice and control. Every split road. Every flip of the coin.

It is our choices which make us who we are.

I may not be able to turn off seeing each aspect of the world in multilayered data readout detail all the time, but I could have chosen to shut myself away and deny all distracting sources of that chaotic information, and recoiled from those I could not eliminate entirely. It was not remotely pleasant when it first came crashing in on me around puberty, let me tell you, realizing that I must see and hear everything that everyone wasn't bothering to say aloud, all the time. I could very well have chosen to be and remain a complete shut-in all through high school and college; in fact, I struggled with the temptation to do so for years (some might even say I lost that struggle, but they would be wrong. I quite deliberately forced myself out of that shell regularly to always try and attack my weakest points, training-style). I could have chosen to be so insecurely proud of my own nerdy differences and odd perceptions that I defiantly refused to believe I needed to learn any extrovert skills that the people who picked on me and looked down on me utilized so effortlessly every day, while secretly inside gnawing myself to the bone in envy at their easy ability to connect the way I never could. These were all choices I had, which everyone has. There is nothing different in how I faced these than in how anyone else would or does or is right now somewhere, and nothing special or rare in my repertoire which allowed me to make the choices I did instead of those. I merely realized that I would rather charge at Life and make of myself what I will, than let it tell me who I am and what I can and cannot be.

Because BRING IT ON THAT'S WHY

To go out into crowds despite the crushing overwhelming fear it brought every time.

To ask the intriguing pretty girl on a goddamn date instead of waiting for the perfect moment that never comes until is made.

To learn to dance instead of believing that I just never would be able to be good at something like that (I was passable, if you're curious, with great potential for more when I lost interest).

To stare into the eyes of someone physically superior to me and actually mentally cow him for ten critical seconds until he disengages, unsure of the power of something he saw in my gaze.

This is why I exhaust so easily in crowds. Every person is a multitude of complex signals all at once; en masse, they are overwhelming to the finite (but ever-expanding) capacity of my mind. But it is also why it was so imperative that I learn to extend that time I can survive in them anyway, because needing to enter and survive and remain fully operational within crowds for a time would not always be my choice.

This is why I spent twelve years of my life trying desperately to convince myself and anyone who interacted with me that I was emotionless, immune to feeling whenever I chose; when left open to others, the cursed volume of each individual, all their feelings, all the clashing subtext of every action with its cause, weighed heavily. Bore me down. Yet this is also why I can speak to you as I am right now.

Why I can see that which others cannot easily see.

Why I can understand the pain and grief and stress and hidden tension of another without having to converse with crude and inadequate vocal sounds.

It is what made me weak.

It is what makes me great.

We live our lives actively, and risk exhaustion, failure, blame and ultimately flirt with inescapable regret and the grief of loss at every turn, but start to become greater one failure at a time. Or else we live our lives passively, only ever reacting when forced, always hiding from the shadow of spending energy for no guaranteed gain in return, and grow fat, content, small in desire and thus easy to satiate more days than not.

That is the choice you have. The choice I have.

Remain small, and grow fat on your own self-created excess. Lazy. Content often, but seldom truly happy. And always, always afraid of being sad, hurting inside, of losing what little you amass. Hide from it. Circumvent it at every turn. Prevent it wherever possible. Protect yourself so avidly, that you remain what you are and little more for as much of ever as fate, called chance, allots you.

Or else flex your mind and shatter the chains with which you have bound yourself. Break free and demand of Life things you have only dreamed of being worthy of, and then become worthy of them. Risk failure and shame at every turn. Skirt disaster and loss, and fall into both sometimes anyway. Value things highly, knowing damn well that you will lose them all in the end. Record every bruise, collect and examine every rivulet of blood that pours from your wounds with shaking hands... and you will take wounds.

But roar in defiance as you do. Give as good as you get.

Do it all in the name of never submitting to the fear that would encapsulate you in a warm but small and simple Life if you would just lull into relaxing, into being partially afraid of statistically nothing, all of the time.

All you have to do is not think, every time there is a chance to where Life will gladly hand you something lukewarm and unremarkable but still a thing you can have if you just don't elect to raise your hand or leave your cushy seat. But the thesis which draws all of this together, the one thing that you must remember is that Life is not your friend. It isn't your ally. It will never help you, nor even consider you individually at all. Oftentimes it will be cruel to you in its indifference, and at times it will be your enemy. You are the grain of sand beneath Life's feet, gem though you may be up close to yourself and to the sandgrains you touch, lost in the endless of miles of beach along with all of the rest of us! The things it tosses you are not hand-picked, they are not truly even for you, and there is no luck or fate that you do not make for yourself using the abilities you were born and built to craft and wield. Those who live carelessly, striving only for ease and the lowest common denominator, they are living on scraps and leavings, and many of them actually consider those scraps to be fate smiling on them when it turns out not to be awful.

And they delude themselves. For we were given the power to make ourselves into greater minds and beings by our own will alone, and I personally believe that to elect not to live in honor of those capabilities of growth, expansion, of a horizon that forever moves back at pace with you to always extend your potential... to not do so daily would be to spit at the feet of whatever you consider to be your creator. Thanks for the boundless capability, but I am satisfied with reality television. With thinking as little as possible whenever convenient. With teaching those around me over time that I will complain and fight you if you should bring the greater-weight training dumbbells of complexity and intrigue into my day.

This is how we choose how remarkable we will ultimately be, or fail to ever become. Not with a bang, but with silence and wordless assent in the face of Life's whims. And to that, I defiantly say:

So yeah. That's what I was thinking about recently. What have you been thinking about recently, Walking Buddy? Tell me below, won't you? I want to sit on the ocean shore in your mind, since you've been so kind as to humor me and join me in mine.

I want to tell you next about the first night I spent in the hospital, that longest, darkest night of my Life to date. But we can do that next time, can we not? This is probably enough realization and heavy pseudo-philosophy for one day. For now, let's nap awhile.

The tumbleweeds, I feel confident betting, will wait patiently for us.

- Gabriel, Space Cowboy of the Mind