Tag: courage

  • Remnant of a Raging Fire

    The world was my oyster. I set out oblivious to the confines of its shell. All I saw was the beautiful lustre and the wild ocean that surrounded it. I set out to tame it. To leave my mark. I remember once witnessing a repeated bickering session between my uncle and his wife when I turned to my cousin and said, “We should show them how it should be done.” I was referring to marriage. We were cocky. He is in his second marriage, and me in my fourth.

    Life is easier as an observer. We have all the technology to be professional voyeurs pretending to be philosophers and activists, denying the fact that all we’ve become are armchair critics. But all is not lost. If anything, many surrender to their armchairs because of the heightened sense of self. If nothing else, the social web that we surround ourselves with has provided affirmations of our condition that was impossible just a generation or two ago. My observation of my weaknesses being expressed with passion by faceless bloggers gives me the comfort of knowing that it’s not only me. And if it’s not only me, then it can’t be my fault. There must be something bigger than us that is doing this to us, right?

    My perspective is sometimes tainted by this reality of virtual life. It’s that much easier to get drawn into the cycle of complacency and distractions, because losing sight of my drive to overcome my obstacles is easy when faced with the validation of my weaknesses. I see too many that are fearless and fierce in their defence of the under dog but struggle to hide the hints of their own sense of worthlessness in real life. The connectedness makes it so much easier to fill the gaps of life with the artificial reality of the other life. We now have three domains of life it seems. The real life, the other life, and the afterlife. Depending on your spiritual persuasion of course. It’s the other life that seems to dominate our attention span which leave the real life and afterlife quite neglected.

    Purpose and grounding cannot be found in a distraction. The shameful truth is that the more connected we are, the less humane we’ve grown. Real tragedies that we witness are easily transformed into notes or likes in the other life. Our desire to be the one to start the trend that others will follow for a few brief moments is that moment in the limelight that we have little hope of achieving in real life. The contamination got worse when those notes and likes started being celebrated in real life. Suddenly my other life gained the validation it needed to be perceived as real rather than as a distraction. So it must be true that my vents, my rants, my passion, and my fearlessness online makes a real difference. It can’t just be a distraction. I am making a difference in real lives. But why then am I still conflicted?

    I think the conflict arises when I leave my other world to dash out for a moment of necessity. There, despite my distraction, is a world over which I yield little influence. There before me is my insignificance staring right back at me. That’s when it occurs to me. In real life I am but a remnant of the fire that rages within. I am misunderstood, and often dismissed as a dreamer, despite those dreams gaining so much subscription in my other life. There is a danger in surrounding ourselves with kindred spirits, and that danger is escalated when the ability to connect with them improves in probability due to the technology that we have to facilitate such polarisation. It polarises us further. Not just socially, but we find ever widening gaps between our sense of self-worth and significance in our other life compared to real life. This shapes our behaviour in ways that will cause much destruction in our lives if we fail to notice the chasm that is forming.

    Living holistically has just become more difficult, despite the additional comfort that we obtain from those that see us without the social stigmas that we can so easily hide in our other life. Living online while existing in real life is a statement of hypocrisy that will leave us uneasy in both. The moment the distractions subside, the realities of each life appear larger than life, and in that, also more daunting. We’ve added a dimension to life that has enriched it, while creating an even greater challenge to be human. Suddenly we’re mostly able to help only those that are reachable online, while those that threaten our personal physical space are denied our indulgence or compassion from fear of them seeing us too clearly.

    Living mindfully is demanded more than ever. Finding congruence between each of my lives has become my new greatest challenge in my efforts to be grounded. My grounding will only ever be manifested in the realisation of being able to apply myself consistently, not just in principle, but in deed, in both my domains of my life, so that my afterlife will not be left wanting. The acid test for me is found in that moment of silence, when I have no technology to distract me, or people to cajole me, and the feeling of consistency or inconsistency descends. When I feel a yearning for one space more than the other, I know that I am a raging fire in one, and merely a remnant in the other. I need to rage in both, or divorce myself from the one that counts less towards my afterlife. But the investment in both is such that I am unwilling to forsake either, and therefore the only option is to ensure that I rage fearlessly in both.

    I often wonder how much more wholesome society would be if we were able to express ourselves in person with the same strength and security that we enjoy through anonymity online. I think it’s possible to achieve this. The equivalent of such anonymity would be the rejection of the opinion of others towards shaping your person. Leave behind the need to feel accepted, but instead nurture the desire to express, and it will result in you attracting those that are similarly impassioned in real life as well. The principles are the same, it’s only the courage that differs.

    (This is an incomplete thought process)

  • Manufactured Threat

    I often stare in awe at people that have the energy to maintain their guard for an extended period of time, often their entire adult life, without appearing drained. They are often unassuming and enthusiastic about life, rarely missing an opportunity to make mention of the many wonderful experiences they’re having every other day. But if you look really closely, there is a quiet lie that accents every word and every gesture. A quiet lie that reveals the pain and the incompleteness of the existence that they pretend is so idyllic. It doesn’t require a trained eye or a special skill to see it. It just requires that you pay attention.

    I look at the smile on people’s faces and most are incomplete. They laugh a lot, and smile even more, but their smile rarely reaches their eyes. Their eyes assume the position needed to complete the gesture, but it lacks the sparkle and the enchanting energy that is exuded when it truly reflects a pleased heart, or a content soul. The mystery of what creates the silent lie often escapes even them because its source is so well hidden that it’s like that trinket that is put away safely because it’s too fragile to handle only to never be found again until some upheaval or significant event causes us to dig into a part of our closet that was always left untouched while waiting for the right moment to arrive. That’s when we’re reminded of the darkness that descended for a while, but was hastily ushered away to prevent prying eyes from noticing the vulnerability that it revealed. But somehow, when that trinket is finally rediscovered, the scars that were too raw to touch or caress may have assumed a charm of their own over the years which finally made it bearable to observe them in a new light while even appreciating them for the characteristic quirks that gave us that endearing trait that we previously would have despised.

    Scars of the soul are as visible as scars of the skin, if not more so but only if you’re paying attention. When we truly seek to engage with another, we’ll see in their eyes what their mouths and bodies refuse to reveal. Their eyes are incapable of lying. Conviction can only be faked if the pretender has convinced themselves of the lie that is being presented. Only then might the eyes conceal it even if only momentarily. And so we go through life protecting ourselves from events that should only have defined a moment in our life, but we nurtured it to define our world instead. In the process of this self-deceit we commit the next greatest harm against ourselves. We create a manufactured threat that convinces us that the defences that belonged to a single moment are necessary for our preservation. But the hurt of the moment was cherished more than the strength we had to survive it, which caused it to grow and fester in our being, while our strength lost its true purpose and instead became a means to maintain a façade that protected us from ourselves while believing that we needed to protect ourselves from the world.

    There is a time in our life when even after all this deception has ravaged us that we will establish a trusted handhold that threatens to draw us out of our fortress. It is at that time that we face the daunting decision to give trust a chance, or to continue with the deception. Most choose the deception and achieve mediocre goals in life that may even seem significant relative to others. Mediocrity is easily seen as greatness if the benchmark is a soul that is damaged more than your own. So we choose our points of reference carefully in order to maintain the deception, all the while convincing ourselves that there is a real threat that we face. A threat that we never expect others to understand because we fail to see the manufactured threats of others while we’re distracted by our own, instead of paying attention.

    Occasionally someone will come along to nudge you out of the stupor. Alas, we’ll likely not notice because attention to the present moment will be dwarfed by our need to protect ourselves.

  • Life

    I feel somewhat weepy today. Strange though, because I have no real reason to feel this way. No, this is not my feminine side showing, it’s my human side. At times the accumulation of life’s struggles creeps up on me without warning, and it’s when things are going well that I realise how bad it was before. It’s a strange sort of weightiness that I feel. I don’t feel weighed down, but I don’t feel lightened of my burdens either. 

    My endeavours to simplify my life have been somewhat fruitful, but the emptiness of space alongside me in bed still leaves me reaching out for something that isn’t there more often than I should. That’s probably the cause of my self-imposed insomnia, especially on Sunday evenings. Despite knowing that I will fall asleep the moment I lay my head down, I resist it with everything in me until I’m literally ready to pass out at my laptop before I begrudgingly drag myself over to the bed.

    At times the exhaustion at that point is so bad that I find myself slithering into place trying to shrug the blanket over me, because I barely have the energy to move my arms. But it’s all not lost, I guess. Outside of these moments I still feel resolute in my naivety, and my optimism still persists. One thing I have resolved never to do is assume that it can’t get any worse. I’ve made that mistake too often before. It can always get worse. 

    If nothing else, the lessons of my life, thus far, have taught me that even when it seems like the darkness is going to overcome me completely, it always only ever took a single split second of light to change that. The trick now is to remember that the next split second could be the one when that light will pierce through the morbidity and pain. It reminds me of so many defining moments in my life. Moments when everything seemed consistently headed in one direction, and in a split second, it all changed. The moment I received that phone call when my first wife died. The moment I received that phone call that I got a job after being out of work for seven months and having made the last payment of my mortgage from my credit card. 

    There is no guarantee what the next split second brings, but because I’m often a creature of probability more than possibility, I easily forget those defining moments in my life, because innately I’m a statistician by nature. And the statistics prove that the trends of my life are mostly mediocre and blandly predictable, rather than unpredictably beautiful. But that’s because I tend to have a jaundiced memory that holds on to those experiences that caused me the most pain rather than those that caused the greatest elation. As ungrateful as that may seem, it makes perfect sense.

    By design, I seek to protect myself from harm and pain, not happiness and joyful laughter. So it’s inevitable that I would be cautioned before I am encouraged. Perhaps that’s why it requires courage and effort to make a life beautiful, because it requires fighting against the very nature that I despise within me. 

  • It takes courage to love again, not a perfect lover.

    Cynically Jaded

  • Suicide of a Romantic

    What is it that stops us from affirming others while they’re alive, as opposed to waiting for their demise before singing their praises? Perhaps we’re afraid of being held accountable for our kind thoughts which denies us that ever convenient exit of ‘I knew it’ or ‘I told you so’ or ‘I should’ve known better’? Or maybe we lack the belief in our own virtues and would rather not have people peering so closely that they may see in us what we despise about ourselves?

    Maybe it’s just that we’re so afraid of being hurt, that we’ll do anything to prevent others from getting too close, so that we don’t ever give them a view of how much they mean to us? That would give them far too much power to hurt or manipulate us. So instead, we create our defenses and do it so well that we end up believing that how we present ourselves to others is all we have to offer.

    Heaven forbid we should live a romantic life. It is possible you know. To live a romantic life and still remain functional and practical about all life’s challenges. But it’s easier to fit in with the jaded crowds than to be true to ourselves, because the risk of failure is too great a source for potential embarrassment. POTENTIAL embarrassment. But the reality of the joy that we’ll experience if we lived romantically now will forever escape us because of our fear of embracing what we desire, lest it be stripped away from us in an untimely fashion.

    So we set ourselves up for heartache and failure, all the while pretending to be comforted by our superficial success in worldly endeavours, ensuring that not another living soul will ever see the romantic fool in us for fear of being mocked or ridiculed for that which is closest to our hearts. So fear drives us to suppress the romance, and embellish the facade so that it becomes the reality of our existence, when in fact it’s the reality of our deception. Sad, isn’t it?

  • A mask for truth

    Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

    Oscar Wilde (via vesperbat)

  • (Source: http://amazonya.tumblr.com/post/9346698592)

  • (Source: http://amazonya.tumblr.com/post/9346698592)