It seems like there are two paths a twenty-something ends up choosing between:
Who do I want to be? or How do I want to live?
They end up at the same place. You end up living the life of the type of person you are. And you end up being the person that lived your life. And obviously they’re the same the whole time. But it doesn’t always seem like it.
Poetry is redundant: expressing in words what is already completely obvious to our heart.
I recall a story I once read by a psychiatrist, a story about a tribe that has a rather unusual way of dealing with moral wrongdoers or lawbreakers. Such a person, when his or her infraction is discovered, is not reproached or condemned but is brought into the center of the village square—and the whole tribe gathers around. Everyone who has ever known this person since the day he or she was born steps forward, one by one, and talks about anything and everything good this person has ever been known to have done. The speakers aren’t allowed to exaggerate or make mountains out of molehills; they have to be realistic, truthful, factual. And the person just sits there, listening, as one by one people talk about all the good things this person has done in the course of his or her life. Sometimes, the process takes several days. When it’s over, the person is released and everyone goes home and there is no discussion of the offense—and there is almost no repetition of offenses (Zunin, 1970).
Nathaniel Branden, “The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand”
Sweetheart what are you thinking?
Do you want to ask your uncle cousin?
Honey what are you thinking in those deep black eyes?
“We have a serious problem. I bet all the money I owe you on the World Cup. You just waited too long to collect. Call me back.”
- outside Momi Toby, SF, 6/29/06
A scientist would study a sorcerer’s words and hand gestures, and he would practice and tinker with them in his lab, and when nothing seemed to come of it, he’d conclude that there was no such thing as magic.
The only rules in life are the ones you set for yourself,
and if you don’t follow them
no one else will.
History is the successful residue of everyone always getting everything wrong.
Happiness is when you know some bad shit is about to happen and you're still happy.
I went outside to sit and write something, and in the field across the street there were some children learning capoeira. I had never seen them practicing there before and it made me think about how things fill up our spaces.
It often makes sense to define words by what they’re not. You can line up 100 different kinds of trees for someone who doesn’t know what a tree is, but if you then showed them a tomato plant, they might still mistake it for a tree. But, if you lined up 100 things that were similar to a tree, but not a tree, they’d figure it out much quicker.
I think people are like that too. Other people are who we’re not; they fill in our voids. When you move to a new place you always end up meeting people who remind you of people from the last place, or from the place before. Those are your people.
Some people get put off if I open up to them too quickly, but it’s because I’ve known them my whole life.
And events are like that too. They fill in the space you’ve opened up for yourself, based on the stance you’ve taken. Your life is the eddy behind a rock in the middle of a creek.
Some people mistake stubbornness for determination. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s this!”
But the problem is, they’re wrong.
Stubbornness is not budging. Determination is navigating towards something.
I think seeing things as action/reaction or cause/effect only works for very simply things. Not everything is so simple. When I push a wooden block with my hand it moves across the table, so that works. But if I approach more complicated tasks as a longer series of small simple tasks something gets lost along the way.
In order to encourage bigger things to happen, new spaces need to be created for them to appear. Like Duchamp said, “Your chance is not the same as mine. Just as your throw of the dice will rarely be the same as mine.”
Hegel believed that the history of man is a progression towards rationality; that man is an organizing force that improves over time. Like how, for the most part, we end up being our parents, except for the small things we decide to change. Maybe our parents didn’t care as much about the environment, or maybe they were alcoholics and beat us, but we swore we’d never be like them. Man lives the same life over and over again with tiny incremental gains; evolution.
