Hazards of the Familiar

I sit and write again – this time writing straight, without much planning for ideas now in a watery mental diffusion. I have to set myself up this way for I’ve identified the weight that accompanies these preparations: the time-intensive yes, but more weighty, the sometimes agonizing gearing-into anticipatory struggles for word and form, an attempt inward, grasping at random bolts of insight until there establishes a cohesive and steady reliable output, an encompassing circle in which my material fills in and completes a naturally-evolved resolution in closing.

A mere introductory musing that may help better define the resistance in the phenomenology of lapse (see entry @) while also providing a handy explanation to my absence! Perhaps all of this phenomenological detail amounts to the fact that I have been lazy in confronting the work of writing. Yes, that sounds like it rings an internal bell. In addition I note the other forms of resistance examined in entry X operating: yes, my cycling once again robbed me of my writing, and also all of this cooking and baking now that I am resorting to bulk ingredients trying to reduce waste...just got done with 60 minutes of chocolate chip banana bread…wow, is it good). Oops, I did it again.

We get caught up in this way, living our everyday, mired in the flare-up concerns of isolated moments in time. I seek the larger projects such as this, the activities that are placed well in my continuum of self: I write today, I have written before, I will write again. These projects oft lie at the fringes as we largely go through the motions of our days. If laziness be the culprit, it follows that attending to the puny island of attention required for most everyday matters permits me off-the-hook for attending to, ahem, my life, that larger edifice that I would never locate in dishes or tidying, or even birthday parties, networking, or emailing. Whole lives can be lived this way. Too much of mine has been sequestered into the narrowness of the daily.

Wake-up calls, though often not very pleasant, allow for this benumbing daily to be ruptured. And so they come as beautiful and worthy messages, something making a little unpleasantry more easily tolerated. Afterward you have to put your daily back in order, and this grants the needed space to not automatically slip into the unmemorable daily, unworthy as appraised by your very own mental faculties to be retained.

I had one recently. It was quite embarrassing in the moment, disorienting me in the near aftermath as to how I could have wound up as I did. Just before the embarrassment, I was in a round of involved and complicated mental hashing of upcoming events and meetings and people I needed to respond to. Oh, these urgencies that consume. So seriously attached I was to my figurings and plan-makings around the minutia of myself, so committed was I to living in a constricted being in the moment, constricted to cognitions, cognitions about such smallness, that I ran my bike at 10mph into a parked car and catapulted over the handlebars, unable to register the impact in time to at least swerve or ricochet. And I was on my block. Someone in hearing the story said in condolence, perhaps that car was parked in a place it normally isn’t? In the days after, I checked out my strong suspicion that indeed this white car chronically parks in the spot I met up with it so intimately. It does. Chronically.

There is a tension in this, the everyday. My first account of the accident (by the way, I am fine – had very minor flesh scrapes and a swollen knee for 2-3 days) was that I was ironically not practicing mindfulness whatsoever. Ironic because I happen to be a mindfulness teacher in my community. The embarrassment of the moment compounded with the embarrassment of hypocrisy. Not being mindful, I concluded, can be dangerous. And I do continue to agree. But there is something more nuanced here than initial considerations and others’ initial feedback suggests.

I critique activity confined in the daily, activity that renders us inept and walled-off in time and from our larger selves. The critique is of attaching too closely to this moment, these concerns, these pressing items of the fleeting and narrow Now. Yet mindfulness-based practice seems to push us into the folds of the present more deeply. Mindfulness, as a fad technique, can leave us not merely isolated in time, but stranded. Appreciating what appears, letting it in, yes, but appreciating in an empty and emptying manner, the annoyingly redundant remarks of sunset-watchers who can only say: “It was amazing.” Perhaps what I label the daily shouldn’t be confused with the opportunities of the day. After all, it is within days that we live; we must live in the houses of days. Paying attention, surely a process I was lacking when I ran myself and my bike asunder, grants a window, a window out of the daily, in opening the daily up from its very own interiors. To pay attention, to “look closer”, perhaps we can free ourselves of the frivolity and wanderings of an overactive mind. Overacting on the daily. To merge a being-orientation of paying attention (allowing the day to unfold before me while on my bike) with my larger temporal self (in the context of my life project(s), I am mindful, I am free.

Ex Nihilo

The constant receding borders of the limits of possibility sweep the proverbial rug from beneath my feet. Possibility engulfs me. It is not the quality of possibility I have been acquainted with from time to time that I now speak, those welcomed, short bursts which catapult into transcendent vision from my everydayness, a bodily ripple of charge, a fierce exciting vitality and empowerment of personal control, but an endless dark vastness which swallows me entirely, the blackness and disorientation of the expanding universe.

It comes from an environment I have praised and continue to praise, one it took years to generate the courage and resources to enter: one with very little imposed, external structure. The structures of my current life evolve from the inside out. I create my work opportunities, my play opportunities, my projects and my pursuits. I create the time at which I wake, I create the physical and interpersonal spaces I inhabit. I even create the challenges and resistances I intend to work through and overcome. I create my days, thus I create a life, my life. Weeks no longer churn in repetitive motions. Mondays are no longer Mondays, each forward-marching return of the sun holds within it its own signature texture. Welcome to 365 flavors.

I have never been with, or operated out of, this sort of monumental blankness, which requires me to draft the structural and decorative lines and construct the mosaic. Over a half-decade ago I began studying existential claims; some years back, I self-identified as an existentialist; only in very recent months have I begun to live existentially. I once thought about existentialism, caught as I now realize in excessive cognition and bloodless argumentation. Now I care only to embody. I do not intend to mislead that my special new context has allowed me a freedom I was once denied by external force and obligation. No, au contraire: All along I have been and am and will be this free, I am now only beginning to feel it, to acknowledge it, to embrace it as the case. My current environment has functioned as a prism of my basic reality that has always already been operating, beneath serious illusions I had adopted as over and against me: the requirements that I needed to live by. I embark on a lived study of un-programming, suitably at the culmination of my formal studies (a large part of the grand withdrawal of external structure).

http://www.amnh.org/sciencebulletins/?sid=a.f.dark_energy.20100319&src=b

Others who have exploded the constructs of obligated living in their lived commitments have provided the pathway to my own avowal of the full creativity of a life, of radical choice. To them I am indebted (but as we know, not in a way that would constrict the abundance of my freedom). When people, in their defense of limitation, caught in the sweet ease of bad faith, smirk and demand from me, “Certainly you are restricted in the fact that you need money to survive,” I simply can give them those who have outgrown humanity into the Übermensch. McCandless and those who live out his spirit today, e.g. Daniel Suelo. Their particular path I may not personally uptake. Freedom demands I carve out my own rather than follow footsteps, however few. Their centrality to my heart lies in the fact that their lives are the exceptions to necessity. They are the (Lived) Statues of Liberty. Maybe I am not cool enough for others to know me in this way yet, but I feel the sweeping power of a name change, a movement from the given designation of my birth name, a marker and example par excellenece of facticity, to a chosen appelation.

I think I’ll choose Supertonin.

This all may seem a bit grandiose and over the top, which is what possibility tends to do to the spirit, I’ll admit. Yet I do not declare it from an untouchable, holier-than-thou perch. I am learning that in every choice, even a choice to choose from the ground up, ex nihilo, there is a building and a demolition. Advantages and downsides. New openings which close down old avenues. For in freedom I have discovered the dark side of the wide blank canvas, the startling paralysis of emptiness, the burden of every action and every decision as my own, my own alone: I have discovered angst. I continue to act, as I must, but action comes with a crippling doubt and commentary: If nothing holds me to this act, if it must be solely me who affirms, upholds, and does this, should I? What good is it? What will this amount to? Is this really mattering? Is this what I want to do? To be known for? To enjoy? To spend my time developing? In possibility, ironically, I can no longer simply do.

What I am left with is a somewhat disorganized assortment of activity, a distracted flittering of attentions, a drowning sea of choice. I find myself in lecture halls with the definitive world expert on rare mosses, I find myself collecting household supplies with which to repurpose and convert into homemade candles, I find myself in meditation circles, I find myself composting, I find myself trying to refine my palette to discriminate wine fermented in oak-barrels v. stainless steel. I find myself reading 100 different topics at once and when asked what books I’ve recently read, have to confess, well, none really. Where do I find myself?
In the recognition that a) I can never again be told what it is that I should be doing (should this occur again, that I cannot take the necessity of it seriously anymore) and b) that there is no path for me to discover, only those I affirm, I am left with whatever. And whatever is both and at once maximally liberating and maximally daunting, the twin pillars of freedom and responsibility, the silent and boundless human experience that I must, by the sheer fact of existence, fill with sound and form.

Create an Interest Map

Out of the wealth of perceptual data we interact with, certain little tidbits can reach out and intensely and intimately grab my diffuse attentions. Initially they reverberate in my inner chambers as if a koan waiting to be solved. After wrestling with what feels to be this hand-delivered message, I begin to see its implications within the workings of my life. These tidbits are only occasionally cosmologic revelation. Most are revelation of an emerging direction for me to take, a theme bubbling up from beneath conscious awareness, a new personal truth.

One such gripping tidbit came to me during a lecture on alternative methods of bodily health and healing, the tidbit being completely irrelevant to this topic of nutritional supplements and ion cleanses, that is. It was said as a preface, a introductory side note, and yet it was this that I took, like a bright gift, most preciously away from that hour’s time of listening to another. The woman introduced herself, trying to give an appropriate context to house the content she was about to share. Succinctly, and with assurance, she declared, “I am not a master of nutrition nor am I a doctor; I am not a master of physiology, although I do have interest as well as training in these areas. However, I am a master herbalist, and I come from that domain of expertise in talking with you today.” With this tidbit now framing my reference point, I began to see the appeal and advantage of being a master of a domain. It was immediately apparent that I was not a master, not a master of anything -- my intense curiosity, something once uniformly treasured, had prevented me from developing this, this “singularity of purpose” (Bow hunter Cameron Hanes’ phrase – coming to me, again in an unrelated forum –we’re talking bow hunting here, resonating this tidbit). I was in awe of what a master commands, how a master works herself into her field, that a master goes beyond his field and thus can enrich it with his personal contributions. The tidbit evolved into the nagging, as yet unanswered question: What do I want to become a master of?

As a result of this irksome inquiry piercing my thoughts at odd times in all manners of day, I decided to undertake a small project this morning that I called an Interest Map, which I intended to be a visual representation of the web of interests that have developed in recent years, highlighting the ones currently active. I began with my intellectual interests. As an intellectual primarily (although I do affiliate with other identities), I found this an effortless beginning and could easily recall prominent books, classes, and discussion group topics that had a basic theme, easily condensed into a word or two, or at most a phrase. Without too much felt condensation, a whole host of material and thought could be identified simply, as in the Master Herbalist’s summary of herself utilizing one fitting term: Herbalist is all she needs for the no doubt vast array of information, orientation, and experience she has behind her mastery. I found that most interests were evolutionarily linked, meaning I started tracing (usually from the currently active backwards in time) interests in a sort of linkable tree, clearly seeing that my interests held within them a natural order, flow, and sense. This felt really good. Suddenly the chaos of my creativity felt more like a logical flow. Like I was heading toward some master plan. And ‘master plan’ contained the ever-desired root word. Overlaying this skeleton I carved in more word nodes from the non- or somewhat- intellectual of interests: the scope of activities that filled my life, beyond mere reading and its associated ideas. Rather than be adjacent or requiring a second Map, these interests aligned in a great synchrony.

Finally I could relate realms of my life, and deduce the emergence of whole new sectors from previous areas that had been dug around in for a sufficient period of time. Interests do seem botanical (although the metaphor is widely applicable): New shoots seem to necessarily branch off interests that are deeply and thoroughly developed. And I smiled in recollection at the birth of new shoots that came in the form of a tidbit to propel the Interests forward – a two-hour movie, an introductory statement. I began to run this way. About a year ago I saw a runner about my age, female, down a path I was driving along near my home. Very ordinary. We all see runners all the time. This had grazed my retinal impressions countless times. Somehow, that day, it grabbed me intensely and intimately and I immediately knew I needed to do this: My body had this awesome capability within it, without really any outside support, it can run incredibly long distances (well, I did indulge in running shoes and technically as of yet I cannot go very far). I have to be able to do this most human of things, to propel my body forward, to traverse miles and miles without using equipment of any kind. As a book later found says, I was born to run.

Perhaps this will be the tidbit for someone in the virtual ‘out there’.

I share this with you, blog-readers, to encourage you to try out something of an Interest Map of your own as it has revealed to me a great and readable narrative of Interests, a catalog of my first decade of adult years. I will enrich it in days to come, transferring it to a large swath of butcher paper and enlivening it with color and image. Within it, I read off the budding mastery already apparent in my world, as well as relieve myself to pursue whatever mastery I so choose at this particular temporal moment, for all my interests lie in wait, spelled out, on my giant map.

Year End / Begin

Having been stuck in the strange removal of reflecting on 2009 personally and projecting into 2010, also personally, for the last two weeks in their near entirety (of course, not in bondage but stuck of my own choosing), I am ripe for temporal musings. This is a practice that I began in its initial form in the handing off of 2006 into 2007’s embrace. Not that these four-digit numbers have relational ties, or even immovable reality for that matter. They are human contrivance. There may be cosmic significance in the completion of a year, a perfect ellipse of our large abode around its nourishing light source, but there really is nothing special about late December’s passing into early January, sorry Jesus. Despite all of this, and the call to move such a transition to an astronomically-relevant marker, such as a solstice (which, is obviously close and conspicuously close at that, here), we are caught up in a tradition that places an end and a beginning, once more, in an endless sequence, a few weeks back. So the creator and publisher of my traveling journal where all my insights, notes, perceived developments, vented frustrations, and half-baked renderings placed its ending on December 31st, 2009 and a new one commenced: I became lost in-between.

I saw myself perched, precariously yet balanced in utter symmetry, between the vastness of years, and the present seduced me. Frozen, I seemed to not age or regress, I occupied peaceful present-centered nirvana. Although technically I wasn’t present-minded, that seemingly Eastern buzzword of enlightened being, as I spanned impossible mental distances that strained my comprehending abilities of understanding the breadth of two years. I should back up here:

This whole undertaking, bordering neurotic in unwavering discipline to capturing scope and detail, was birthed of a terror given to me by my mother. It was some time prior to 2006, when the massive cataloguing and rendering myself in time became imperative, when I nonchalantly asked her to recall the summer of her 20th year, the very season I found myself so vibrantly in, so wrapped up in, as we all are, in its fine-grained concerns and matters: the thick reverberations of a summer courses’ texts and online discussions (and the sweltering afternoons attempting - for the last time in my albinic life - sunbathing, ruining those summer course texts as the electromagnetic blare melted binding glue), the near daily there-and-back along the corridor of Frontage Road to-and-from my retail job, where I stood outside next to a rounder of last month’s color schema of sale t-shirts to prevent passerby theft, the rocky streamsides and graded hillsides and narrow roadsides my sister and I found ourselves on as we tried encapsulating songs into images that interwove the ambitions and drama of youth and place. My mother manifested a blank, if not curious, stare as she peered in her mind’s eye, back, further back, back some more. Prior to the acclimating gauges of the birth of children. Subsequent to the relative guides of adolescent cyclic school structure. A lost time. Blog-readers, I assure you, if you, like me, find this lack of specificity of an entire season to be off-putting and felt uneasy, I testify my mother’s within-range memorial capacity. Test this yourself with your own mid-lifers and beyond. You will find that they struggle, like she, in placing particular long-ago summers and falls and winters in their nuanced meanings.

I could not conceive that this inevitable elongation of personal time could threaten integral identity within a cruel mind ill-equipped to hold on, would be my fate as I aged into the era of the long adulthood. For what was the purpose of my current enjoyments and ecstasies, frets and strivings, the whole of my lived experience, if unrecallable? Anathema, I declared. Thus I embarked on an involved pursuit I continue to harbor - how to render a life unfolding in time.

Of course, this pursuit could take on unwieldy proportions, and I understand this pitfall, and peel myself away from the tempting process of year end / begin, even as it swells, iteration to iteration. A human life is not entirely factical, until one‘s demise in death, and even that is up for further consideration, as I debated with someone today. We are always, in Sartrean exposition, a unified mixture of facticity and transcendence, and this transcending being means that one’s life project, taken as a whole, can never be neatly summed, packaged in a year as I attempt to do. New importances of 2009 will grow out of a future I cannot now fully anticipate, events matter not solidly, but in an ever-changing fashion. As we remake ourselves, so our years are remade. What is revealed to me in looking back now may become irrelevant, and even things never noted may bear upon me, with insidious foundations in 2009’s basement of undocumented hidden layers. However, I will be armed with material I can speak from: 2009 will not perish in obscurity, bleeding its palpable vitality into the enveloping summers of 27...25...28...24...

Year end / begin is a fascinating tour of a developing personal world and an active attempt to redirect the constant unreflective that produces the current undulations we are so often caught up in, as if our lives were being led by powerful puppeting agents pulling us this way and that. The removal from one’s captivating, regular flow of everyday life helps, but doesn’t entirely, effect a distance from oneself, as in Harry Stack Sullivan’s participant-observer. This is the power behind formats of retreat, a way of getting out and under the weight of one's occupations always already ongoing. Seeing it as a pause for self-in-time-analysis, it takes shape, for me, only through sitting heavily with the data of the year at my disposal and my initial sketches of description. My bulging journal sits there unintelligible, unnavigable, widely intimidating in disperse content and perhaps some nonsense. I begin perusing, then linking, then like the closing of a closely-followed, enrapturing plot line, I suddenly get it. My journal becomes but variations on a theme. Year end / begin enacts a reclaiming of myself. Coming out as of recently, I feel uninterrupted, capable, actively uptaking my world in service of the missions I’ve declared worthy of my limited, and relatively impotent, energies. Galloping headlong into chosen avenues of activity I've seen in ghostly apparition of a possible and wanted 2010.

It may not work in this manner for some. I just describe and encourage because of the wonders of continuity and insight it has provided me.

By no means have I mastered temporality in this little year end / begin undertaking. This is not the secret law of attracting anything possible to my liking. As the ground from which all meaning can spring, time is our fundamental horizon, as Heidegger showed me in Being and Time. It is the interpretation of our being. At every year’s turning, I can mentally imagine and try to enact the ceasing of its relentless march, but it always exceeds my grasp, even in my in-home (and in-coffeehouse) retreats. In this way, our lives exceed our understandings we can have of ourselves. Still, I cannot stand the thought of becoming patchy and vague, so I try. Share please, whoever has found themselves here, the ways in which you see your temporal unfolding, how you make sense (or find yourself at a loss), what a new year means for you.


For those interested, I have posted some (that is, a tiny slice) of the products of year end / begin on the Happiness Project site http://www.happinessprojecttoolbox.com/

(if you can find me by my name given at birth). This is a corresponding blog and website of tools to a new book by Gretchen Rubin, her own temporal project of infusing a year with “the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happy--from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah. As one of the hundreds of happiness experiments I conducted during the research and writing of the book, I started this blog. Here, I recount my daily adventures in pursuit of happiness.”