Satisfaction

I am a deeply conflicted individual. On the one hand, I feel as though I must experience a struggle in order to create and that I must suffer through these days for the purpose of coming to some deeper understanding of life and my lonely place in it. On the other, I feel as though none of it really matters at all, that I would much rather be in a state of bliss complete with minor delusions, to create based on the whims of my fleeting emotions instead of through sheer will. John Stuart Mill, a man that I most admire for his intelligence, once said in his work, Utilitarianism: "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question." My concern is that I have only this one life to live and to give. Should I extinguish satisfaction in favor of the higher form of being, the Socrates instead of the fool, even if the latter could guarantee a more emotionally fulfilling existence? I feel like I should want to be intellectually fulfilled, but I also feel like doing so may compromise my deeply rooted wish for a satisfactory lifestyle. What, ultimately, determines the factors of the "fool?"  Is it like being the individual chained to the walls of Plato's cave, content with considering the playful images dancing along the wall reality instead of freeing herself to explore the wild and terrifyingly unpredictable world outside of said cave?

Every time I'm happy, I recognize it and become fearful of losing this pleasure. It's not a baser instinctive pleasure, the bodily pleasure, that Mill so condemned in favor of the higher form, the intellectual form. It's also not in the category of the stagnating contentment that so often corrupts a person's potential greatness. This happiness is one of discovering a fulfilling pleasure in life, in just being, in learning and experiencing the joys and challenges presented by circumstances. The struggles and difficulties become like a wave cresting the surface of the ocean that I meet with open arms and allow to carry me to new places. I do not overthink things. I just breathe and experience them with an active mind. I paint, I write, I play, I read, I walk, I listen, I smile, I learn, I accept new challenges, I connect with a rhythm that isn't noticed when the volume of the mind is turned up so loud, I feel a connection with everything and everyone, I let go, I relinquish my incessant need to control in favor of enjoying the ride. I do not stand still. I continue moving at a leisurely pace, pausing occasionally to appreciate the moment, and then move on again.

The problem is when this ceases. It's like I become so aware of it that it suddenly flees like a startled animal, afraid of being pinned down and caged to be studied. It's like an image that you notice in your peripheral vision that disappears when you turn to look closer at it. It defies labeling and evades the snare of analysis, both being tools of controlling the world within and around us. When I try to understand it, that's when a compulsive anxiety flaps in my chest like a frightened bird in a cage. The wonder mutates into worry, the awe shifting into this ghastly vision of fear. Problems arise where none had been before, created in my own mind out of an anxious need to understand things to death. Everything stills as I try to pin things down with my mind. The bird panics and all I can hear is the high-pitched squawking that drowns out the rhythm that was once so clear to me. I feel like I deserve this version of reality, that this is the way it should be if I am to get anywhere in life. I know this is not true. My heart stagnates when my mind is aflutter like this. Every time. I know it is wrong and that I should try to shush the incessant bleating that beats away at my calm, but it cripples me.

I don't wish to calm the waters. I only wish to swim better. This intense anxiety makes me feel like I'm trying to stand up straight and still in thrusting waves.

I wonder...do you have to be dissatisfied in order to be like Socrates?

Improvement

"Your self does not end where you flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings. Moreover this annexed personal space is not static. It is elastic. It morphs every time you put on or take off your clothes, wear skis or scuba gear, or wield any tool. When you eat with a knife or a fork, your peripersonal space grows to envelop them. Brain cells that normally represent space no farther out than your fingertips expand their fields of awareness along the length of each utensil, making them part of you."  - The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, by Sandra Blakeslee & Matthew Blakeslee

 I'm currently reading through the book Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance, written by Richard Restak, M.D. Within the crisp pages and embedded in the third chapter, "Specific Steps for Enhancing Your Brain's Performance," is a section on enhancing your body's innate peripersonal space (or PPS). PPS is the "force field" around our body's skin that can extend our body's boundaries. This is what helps us to navigate our bodies through crowded sidewalks without bumping in to other people. When we manipulate other objects, such as our vehicles, our PPS includes them, making it easier to park in tight spaces. Musicians extend their PPS to their instruments when they're playing them.

What I find very interesting is when we extend that PPS to include other people. Our close friends, our relatives, our partners, and even our pets become a part of us, an extension of who we are and how we perceive their existence. It's no wonder that we grieve the way we do when a person who is close to us is injured, ill, or, worse, perishes. Though we may care about the person in general and objectively find value in their being alive, we also tend to focus on them as being a part of ourselves. When the other is harmed, we are, in effect, harmed as well. When the other is ill, we are ill. When the other dies, a part of us dies along with them. We are not separate from the other people in our lives. We aren't even separate from the other people and things in the world, despite our not being aware of their existence. We all share something and are in some ways connected. When they are closer to our hearts and our bodies, we are simply more aware of them as being an extension of ourselves.

For the longest time, I've believed myself to be misanthropic, yet despite this notion, I continually fell in love with people. Now I realize that I was never particularly misanthropic, but that I was unhappy with some parts of myself, and it was only when other people revealed those parts to me that I disliked them. Being more honest and at peace with myself has allowed me to be more honest and at peace with other people. It's still allowing me to find something beautiful in everyone and to appreciate their existence more so than before. They're all a part of me, and I think that's great. I'm a part of them, and I think that's even better.

Practicality and Creativity Will Save the Day...and Some Cash

I would consider myself a fairly practical gal. I own few possessions, and the item I own the most of are books, which I have recently began purchasing on the cheap at thrift stores or for free on the Kindle or borrowed from friends and the library. I have a select few clothes that I wear regularly, like a few pairs of jeans, some simple shirts/tops, a couple pairs of shoes that I will wear to the bone, and some hats or scarves bought for $0.50/each at my favorite thrift store. I don't wear much jewelry, I shave my own hair in a GI Jane-style buzzcut, and I tend to enjoy the simple things in life, like learning a musical instrument, writing, reading, taking walks, painting, playing Nerf Wars, and sitting around a bonfire with some cheap alcohol and good company.

Damn... I'm gonna need a bigger eraser!

And yet, I still haven't managed to pay off my debts. I'm approximately a whole $6,000 in the hole with credit cards and a loan, used for a couple of surgeries. $1,700 here, $2,000 there, another $2,300 over there, and that's not including my approximately $5,000 school loans that are still in deferment. A lack of brutal budgeting has led to my seemingly permanent procrastination in paying off these debts. Though I know there are thousands of other individuals and families who are in far deeper debt, the debt that I have accrued still holds me under just enough to occasionally gasp for breath. I keep kicking and flailing, trying to break free of this hold that bars me from doing the things that I think will add to the quality of my life -- travel, see new places, visit the people that I adore.

I also had a CoxHealth bill that was preventing me from working toward paying off my credit card and loan debts. Recently, I went ahead and paid the rest of the $300+ bill off and scratched it off my seemingly eternal "To-Do" list. Immediately, I noticed a shift of the burden on my shoulders. I felt lighter, a little closer to the surface of the ocean of debt. I liked it.

I liked it so much that I decided I would budget my income and place paying these bills off as my number one priority. I will attempt to use $500 of my monthly income (roughly half of what I make per month) to put towards paying off my debts, one at a time. In order to do this, I need to go out less (for drinks and food) and buy basic foods in bulk for home-cooked meals. In a time of microwavable meals in a matter of a few minutes, this will be a challenge for me. I've spoiled myself with expensive daily trips to the supermarket for Steamables, Rockstars, and 6-packs of Carona or Boulevard Wheat. My cooking skills consist mainly of tossing a pre-cooked meal in the microwave and waiting impatiently for 2-5 minutes for my steaming soggy supper.

I have become complacent with how I indulge most of my whims when it concerns food and drink. Now I have to relearn how I think about food its preparation. This will be difficult at first, but I think it will be beneficial overall. On top of saving money, I will probably end up losing some of the weight that I've gained while satisfying my urges to drink anything except cheap coffee and tap water.

Grains and legumes in bulk, my new best friends

This should prove to be an interesting and most inventive journey. If anyone has any tips on cheap, healthy food recipes where I can buy the ingredients in bulk, I would be ever so grateful for your shared wisdom!

The Due Date

You never quite realize how much time and energy is spent on such mundane things until you remember that neither are as expendable as you've been treating them. There is a limited amount of both; a deadline that you will eventually approach, and once that date hits, the only thing you'll be hoping for is that the product of all that time and energy spent will have been decent enough to make some kind of mark on the world, like a novel, a novella, a short story, or just a lonely blog caught in the cyber time capsule. You won't be wishing that you spent more time on Facebook reposting the same pictures that at least 12 of your other "friends" have already shared. You won't be pondering all of the most updated pins on Pinterest that you've missed in the last three hours off the computer. You won't be wondering how one of the worst characters in the world, Ted Mosby, ended up meeting his wife as you follow obliviously along with the laugh tracks for your cue to enjoy a joke. That is, unless your last moments of conscious thought are annihilated by some kind of feverish delusional state of mind.

The moments that you are going to recall with a sense of wonder and true contentment are those when you are freed from the burdens of a strictly web-based social life. They're going to be the moments when you first learned a new trick or how to completely play Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano without looking at the book or your hands. They're going to be the moments when you were exchanging laughter with loved ones and you can't help but smile when you recount the freedom of childlike amusement. They're going to be the times when you escaped into a world of curiosity and discovered for yourself revelations that only few others have encountered before in their lives. Sometimes they're not the most productive moments, and sometimes they're not long-lasting, but they're the moments that make the struggles in life well worth the effort, and they're the moments that compile your personal story.

Trust me, you don't want to hit that deadline and all you have to show for it is a pile of disorganized scrap paper with scribbles and frequently repeated lines carelessly scratched into them with a pen that ran all out of ink well before hour zero.

It's About Seeing the Rising Moon

My grandfather passed away last Sunday, December 18, 2011, following an excruciating hospital visit that lasted over a week. I visited him for a couple of days while he was there, a ventilator and everywhere tubes invading his body as he stressed under the pressure of pneumonia. He would occasionally awaken, and I wondered how much he comprehended when he looked at us through those dreary eyes, glassy from the medication. He seemed to respond to questions fairly well. In any case, I can never be sure, but I hope that he was aware that I was there with him, even if just for a little while, as he lay dying in the sterile, florescent-lit hospital. I hope that he saw me when I bent over him as he temporarily woke last Wednesday, a week prior to his funeral, and said that I was leaving to go back to work, but that I would be back as soon as I could and that I loved him. I watched his eyes slowly panned toward mine, the corners wet and crusting, the blue tubes forcing his mouth uncomfortably open, and he nodded his head. The lids of his eyes fluttered shut as he fell back into a medicated slumber. I felt a bitterness in my heart. After 36 hours of wakefulness and worry fueled by adrenaline and anxiety, an eight-hour nap, and then more wakefulness and worry, I felt like I was abandoning him. I wished I could replace the ventilator tube jammed down his throat with a more soothing pipe tobacco that he once so loved to smoke. I wished I could replace the sound of whirring and beeping machines with the music of his favorite singers, like Dorris Day. I wished I could replace the stiff hospital bed that he had to be assisted by two nurses to maneuver in with his favorite recliner. I was angry that he couldn't enjoy his time, surely the last of his days alive. I was scared that this would be the final interaction that I would have with him, the slow nod of his head, which I am still unsure if he was totally aware of my presence.

I packed my things to leave to his side again on the weekend. My mother had been texting me continually with how his health was progressing or regressing. Things were looking alright. Not good, but not necessarily much worse than when I left him. And then I received a text that said he was having irregular heartbeats. Then a simple message: "Dad is passing." Early the following morning, "Dad just left us."

As though he was only out to pick up a gallon of milk. As though he was just out to grab a bite to eat. As though he was expected to return. He just left. He left.

*   *   *

I read a Time magazine article today, dated from 1990. The author, Pico Iyer, tells of the time when his house burned down in California. The story's kicker states: "My only solace came from the final irony. In the manuscript I had saved, I had quoted the poem of the 17th century Japanese wanderer Basho, describing how destruction can sometimes bring a kind of clarity:

My house burned down / Now I can better see / The rising moon."

Revival

I was originally set out to revive Meaningful Memes with an article about something that annoys me. A hand-written banter of opinions about other people's opinions on a topic that I am not nearly as educated about as I would like to be sits on my desk. The dark scribbles are neat and clean, a few scratches here and there as I picked words from my mind with as much care as I could muster in those moments of frustration. These words mock and degrade others with the intention of promoting a positive notion: think before you speak/write.

Upon realizing the hypocrisy with a thoughtful reflection, I decided not to share these words with the rest of the world. They will, instead, meet their timely end in the recycle box with the mess of millions of other easily discarded ideas and words once thought and spoken in some forever drifting moment of time.

Instead, I will utilize this moment for the sake of goodness and hope. As the new year approaches like the dawn of a new and shining day, I find myself in want of a truer embrace of beauty. I feel a pull on my heart by the gravity of impermanence, and I wonder why I feel so weighted down. A self-righteous pessimism disguised for many years as realism has stunted my growth and robbed me of my energy. I no longer want the weight of this ugliness that has beseeched my attention for more days than I would like to recount. This crass lifestyle of crude behavior confused with boldness and unharnessed glowering mistaken for virtuosity have tarnished my image and brutalized my intentions for goodness.

So I hope to be rid of these deplorable habits. Slowly, I have been working towards a more positive and beautiful existence. I have dismissed cigarettes from their vice-like grip on my life. For over three weeks now, I have breached the destructive relationship I had with nicotine. I have incorporated art as a steady companion. I'm learning how to paint glasses and dishware to be given as holiday gifts and to, maybe one day, sell to willing buyers for a slight profit. I'm learning to love writing again, imploring my skill and talent to reawaken and keep me company. I'm allowing my curiosity and imagination more free reign in my life. I'm allowing myself to love without an expectation of anything in return. I'm letting go of expectations in general with the goal of enjoying life as it comes. I'm strongly considering becoming vegetarian once again. I'm building courage and banishing unnecessary anxieties that prevent me from completely being myself. I've began my own website dedicated to the webcomics I've been making, called www.CandidComics.BlackInkComics.com (though have been slow in making more, due to recent unfortunate incidents that have significantly affected my funny bone).

I want to see beautiful things and create more beauty. I hope you'll join me in this travel of beauty, goodness, joy, and love.