"Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end"-
Jack Kerouac
It’s been a while since I’ve been here. And I mean that in every sense – of both word and world. It’s been a while since I’ve been back to my most basic – outside of an image I have been trying very hard to construct over the last few years. A watercolour visage of a person who fits – with people, with places with a priori performance. Career settled and casually self-effacing. This is decidedly not who I am. It never has been. I have never enjoyed company for too long, nor have I ever been able to be casual about myself, my work or my wants. I have always been inherently uncomfortable with the idea of comfort. Recently, I have felt myself lost in the camouflage because it has been oddly convincing. Enough, for me to buy into it myself... or to want to.
I presently find myself at a détente between dream and disillusionment. I miss much of my old self – before I had time for all this impromptu ‘adjusting’. I don’t read anymore. Sure, I read articles and philosophy books but I don’t delve or dive in the way I used to. I don't spend time beside my bedside before I sleep. Tragically, I now sleep mostly to the sound of the television. I haven’t touched the long novel in years. I don’t drown anymore. Since my divorce, I have been very careful not to. This detachment has led me to question my direction again... I desperately want to be one of those practical, calculating individuals who know what they want and scorch their path to success getting there. They are well adjusted and enjoy the company of friends and family. They balance work, pleasure and play and always aspire for more. This is how I see myself. This is also the polar opposite of who I am and that has finally begun to pose a problem. ‘The truth will out’ as they say, or as Cervantes puts it "The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water".
And so, I presently find myself in the process of readjusting my ‘Ikigai’ 生き甲斐 . I came to this term via a facebook meme and literally translated it means ‘a reason for being’. Put in practice in Okinawa cultures, it constitutes ‘a reason to get up in the morning’ i.e. a reason to enjoy life. It is the most fundamental of value monikers, used as a barometer for what one considers mental or spiritual stimulus that enriches their existence. Wikipedia tells me that ‘Behaviours that make one feel ikigai are not actions which individuals are forced to take – these are natural and spontaneous actions’. I suppose the ultimate goal then is for them to become subsumed as aspects of one’s personality to the point where the ‘iki’ (life) and ‘kai’ (the realisation of what one expects and hopes for) inherently complement one another. To cut to the chase – mine don’t. What I want is a centre that I have control over and can define and my actions of late have mostly involved uninterrupted hours, sometimes even days, of sleep. My time over the past year or so has been navigated between work, eat and sleep. Emphasis on the latter.
And this is what brings me back here I suppose. For the bulk of my life, when things get muddled in my mind I tend to seek clarity by meandering through the muddles in language – on paper and then pixel. It's why I need to write again I suppose, because as much as I thought turning 30 meant finally abandoning ‘childish things’ such as maudlin musings and wistful, wishful thinking about what I wanted out of myself - it appears one is never truly done with any of that. Nor should I be. Only, I hope that this time I can learn to write with a purpose. To
that end, I return ‘a posse ad esse’ (from being able to being) determined, this time around, to weave possibility into actuality.
I am opening with what can only be deemed one of pop-psychology's worst fix- its – 28 Days. Plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz devised that, generally speaking, it takes a person 21 days to coin or break a habit. Some say 18, some 32 and others 28... the idea being that a specific number allows our cognitive cowardice to locate a scapegoat and believe we can change. The routine, whatever it may be, serves as the placebo. The key is the drive that this very ‘achievable’ sounding trigger can offer and so many of us finally ‘try’. Trying is all that is really needed but having a strategy grounded in faulty logic and Anonymous inc focus groups helps one ‘trust the try’ this time around. I am ‘trusting my trying’ with the number 28, because given the variables of personality and performance - it doesn’t really matter anyway and mostly because I like how it sounds.
There are so many things to change and consequently there so many places to start. The starting itself has been a revelation. I have been particularly self- indulgent and begun re-reading Cervantes. This is my second time reading Don Quixote, the first time I read it I was 15 years old and I finished the entire novel in two days. I used to read like that back then, at a blurring pace born out of desperation in order to seek some sense of inner salvation. Often, I would read out loud to drown out the voices in my head and the toxic ones that surrounded me. I didn’t really read to drown myself or to feel but I still remember some sentences. I remember knowing that this was perhaps one of the most beautiful things I was ever likely to read, because it was naïve and kind and foolish and wise and ...Quixotic. Recently, a friend of mine faced a terrible tragedy that overturned his entire existence and in the aftermath we spent hours watching The Newsroom as some kind of pathetic temporal tranquilliser. The premise of the show rested on someone being handed a copy of Don Quixote to allow for idealism in the face of common sense.
I feel I need some of that right now and so this time, I am determined to drown. Cervantes’ passage on sleep has ironically proved to be an awakening “All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse”.
Now that I finally find myself somewhat awake, I am resting on my second step to lead me into some kind of objective absolution. Stage two of my 28 Days involves detoxing and I was brought to this point a few months ago when I watched a video by Uruguayan ex-president Jose Mujica, whose people affectionately call him Pepe. There is so much in his words that cuts me and the worst is, I cannot identify why. I have never truly been able to ground myself in ideologies, I only ever skirt around them – occasionally dipping my feet or washing my face. I do not want to drown here - not even swim, truth be told. There are purer waters and safer shores for that. So I’m no socialist. I'm not brave enough for that. That said, I do long for a perspective out of the one I have cultivated for myself, wrought in trying to belong through my belongings. “I’m a reader – look at my overflowing bookshelves. I love music, look at my pretty playlists. I love art – can’t you see it splattered all around me?” To be clear, I don’t arrive at this point out of guilt. I enjoy the rush of purchase as much as the next person but I have discovered more and more that it is followed less and less by process. I buy something and forget to use it, far too focused on buying my next something. In that vein, I now rule for a reprieve. I am giving myself these 28 days to not buy anything new, to use everything I have and in that enterprise, hopefully re-discover how much that is. I have logged out of facebook and twitter so that I can finally find and fix time – for reading, writing, studying. I am presently applying myself to my applications and Cervantes. I've thrown in a lot of archiving – some days I take out all my shoes and clean them, remembering which ones I haven’t worn in ages; other days I do the same thing with earrings. Yesterday, I organised my make-up. It gives me the chance to re-discover and finally USE all these ‘things’ I once bought while buying into that oh-so familiar delusion that they would solidify me because they were just ‘so me’ that I had to have them. That without them it would be hard to define myself completely somehow.
Detoxing, has also meant dragging my body along in an attempt to awaken it from its long held stupor. I have gotten too comfortable with folds of fat serving as my security. Because that is what they really are. When eating one’s emotions, the goal is to ensure you don’t have to run the race. You don’t have to exist or appear for anyone else. The latter is generally a good thing. It wouldn't matter worth a damn if I was fine with the way I looked but I never have been. That only renders this cellulite crutch as the excuse I have to not bother trying. I haven’t even been able to do that properly, because I still have an audience. Only now it’s an audience into my anxiety. Anxiety I carry on my hips and my belly, layering my shoulders and weighing me down every breath each time I try to (literally) run away from it. Which is all to say, I’ve hired a trainer. Someone to push me into pushing myself.
It has been three days since I’ve been on this particular life-detox and after the initial vertigo, I now find myself finally enjoying the endless possibility. Living in the real world, as opposed to one where we are all caricatures of ourselves, has its rewards. I have bought plants and I spend my morning watering them, as opposed to staring at inspirational quotes on facebook inscribed on pictures of plants. I am taking on tasks with the express purpose of finishing them. This means that more and more post-its on my wall make it to the bin by the end of the day. Pepe says “And this is what I discovered: Either you’re happy with very little, free of all that extra luggage, because you have happiness inside, or you don’t get anywhere! I am not advocating poverty. I am advocating sobriety. But since we have invented a consumer society, the economy must constantly grow. If it fails to increase it’s a tragedy. We have invented a mountain of superfluous needs. Shopping for new, discarding the old...That’s a waste of our lives! When I buy something, when you buy something, we’re not paying money for it. You’re paying with the hours of life you had to spend earning that money. The difference is that life is one thing that money can’t buy. Life only gets shorter. And it is pitiful to waste one’s life and freedom that way.”
I am beginning to understand this better.
The idea of not locating myself in the illusion of myself. An illusion created and forever cyclically grounded in possession. We all need things but it is odd that we want to need them. I suppose this prevents us from both wanting and needing more for and from ourselves. I see myself finishing things now; reading the books I own; writing in my pretty journals; cooking rather than ordering; luxuriating in multiple cups of coffee and tea and mat'e – in slow, languid sips, like molasses. I am not planning new outfits but rummaging through my closet taking out old ones I no longer fit into and deciding to do so.
In the first book of de La Mancha, Cervantes opens with “I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.” What’s really funny is that often the latter comes back full circle. You re-discover what you always wanted and shed the baggage of expectation like barnacles of the mind. You vanquish rose-tinted spectacles and trade them in for regular anti-glare ones.
And you realise that this is enough. It was always enough.
You just never allowed it be.
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