Why start a blog?
When it comes to new pursuits, or major life decisions, the ‘Why?’ question is something I am trying to get away from. I find that it is easy to justify almost any decision if you have a broad enough perspective and are willing to tell yourself a few small untruths. Why should I eat a pint of ice cream for dessert? Because, ice cream is delicious, and I haven’t had dessert in a while. Besides, we are only on this Earth for so long, and what is life without the pleasure of chocolate and sweets – what real reason is there to deprive myself? vs. Why shouldn’t I eat a pint of ice cream for dessert? Because, I’ve been working out consistently and I want to prove to myself that I have the self-control to be stay in good shape. Besides, strength of the mind is an important thing to develop, and if I eat that pint of ice cream, it will just be giving in to my childish sweet-tooth, and lack of self-control.
Trying to impose a ‘Why?’ in any given decision doesn’t make much sense to me. Better, I believe, is to consider what you want in a broader sense, then weigh how a certain decision might move you closer to or further from a sense of yourself you are currently working on. How does your desire to demonstrate mind-over-matter weigh against your desire to value your own relaxation and momentary enjoyment?
I know this sounds like the same thing as asking ‘Why?’, just using a few different words, but there are critical differences. For one, the process is not specific to an isolated situation, it requires identifying and valuing underlying motivations which will be pertinent to a great number of decisions. When you call your deep-seeded values to mind in the making of one decision, it is harder to ignore them when making your next, similar decision. On the other hand, if you rely on surface level logic, without grounding your reasoning in a deeper personal philosophy, it is easy for your decision making to be flimsy and unsatisfactory – changing easily depending on minor changes in circumstance that negate your slapdash logic. There are a million ways to apply logic to any decision – just because you can come up with a good way to explain a decision, does not mean that it is the right decision for you.
For a long time, I feel I have been setting my direction based on an ungrounded logic, but making most of my day-to-day decisions according to the currents of my true ideals. It creates a strange sense of tension between my long term goals and my lived experience. It also, for me, leads to the quick expiry of long term plans.
Because of this, in combination with an unsatiable appetite for variety and new pursuits, I have staked my future on innumerable career paths in the past few years. I have imagined myself as a novelist, hermitic, secreted away in an Edinburgh flat – the grim climate an accent to the thunderhead of my prose. I’ve seen futures as a doctor, a paramedic, a war journalist, a restaurateur. I’ve lusted for the life of a ski bum, a surf bum, a sculptor, an animator. But beyond imagination, vision and lust, these are all ideas of myself I have worked towards.
To most of these pursuits, I have brought vigorous devotion and an ultimately ephemeral resolve that this would be it. The path my life was meant to follow. In the throes of such passions, I dedicate my whole being to the pursuit of an ideal that I have fashioned for myself through flimsy logic. If anyone asks me to explain myself, I can do it without issue. I can wax eloquently on the life-gripping passion which has taken hold of me. I can connect my latest pursuit with life goals that make sense to others and speak truly, on some level, to my own desires as well. I want to be a doctor. I want to help people and be a problem solver. I want to work as part of a team. I want a good income and stability for a future family. It all makes sense, but ultimately, the logical explanation of the pursuit cannot override deeper seated needs and desires – the desire for personal freedom, for a broad scope of field, for greater control over the day to day of my life.
For a long time, each forsaken pursuit struck like an ego death – an absolute loss of self. To define my future around something, to believe with ecstatic energy in that future, and then to feel it slowly dissolve in my hands after spending weeks or months working towards it was debilitating. Like Sisyphus, I felt I had conquered my mountain of self-determinism only to be thrust violently back into an infancy of consciousness – emptied following the vigorous high of realized self-discovery and forced to start again in my quest for purpose.
In reality, it was seldom as bad as that. Throughout all of this I maintained throughlines in my relationships, hobbies, many core opinions and beliefs – but I never thought to examine these throughlines in my search for purpose – my purpose was something of more rarified air, something still waiting to be found. Thus, my life continued in a conniption.
Eventually, I became aware of the pattern of violent ups and downs. I felt the toll that it was taking on me and was honest with myself about a need for change. My lust for new pursuits has not abated, but an awareness of the likely brevity of any new passion has allowed me a more Wu Wei mindset in the act of moving on. It is what the sage Facebook mom’s of the world have known for millenia:
This awareness has freed me a great deal. Instead of defining myself by easily articulated titles – lawyer, doctor, etc. I now take more interest in the driving patterns of my life, penchant for change included, and currents that move the world around me. Focusing on the fundamentals of who I am and who I want to be has allowed me to take more from my experiences and feel more comfortable with the common transience of my life circumstances and interests – two things which have always been inevitable for me.
Being conscious about self-understanding is difficult, as is putting that understanding into action. It is uncomfortable to strip away the logic under which you hide your unhealthy habits – even more uncomfortable to know that there will always be more to uncover. But it is also liberating, allowing slow, confident movement in a direction that is true to your person. I see this movement in three parts.
1. Understanding myself. Having a grasp on both the roots of my emotions and the winds that move them. What brings me happiness, what brings me contentedness, what makes me angry, stressed or despondent? And then, once I have have seen the source, I ask myself, why?.
I am unduly annoyed after someone bumps me on the T, why? I’m smiling the rest of the walk home after someone makes way for me to pass on a crowded sidewalk, why? I can’t stop thinking about the Tremfaya billboard down the street from my apartment, why? After asking why, I think about any biases I may have clouding my judgement, and preconceptions I’m bringing with me. Then, I try to acknowledge and remove the influence of my preconceptions and biases and ask the question again. This is, I think, the hardest and most critical step.
Our convictions are often what ground us – they provide structure to our world. If I believe most people are self-concerned, acting predominantly in their own immediate self-interest, I can easily apply this belief to 1,000 experiences throughout my day – come to a sensical conclusion regarding the cause of these experiences, based on my preconception, and thus move through life neither challenging my beliefs nor wasting time trying to explain the world as it plays out around me. You could do likewise believing most people are benevolent and giving-hearted.
We all carry convictions that allow us to make easy sense of life. We also carry convictions about ourselves, these too allow us to live without constantly questioning who we are. They allow us to operate with a stable self-image, and to diverge from them is to cede ground and thus invite instability, anxiety and uncertainty.
I may define myself, in some small way, as someone who does not like breakfast (I actually love breakfast). Throughout my life, in occasional breakfast-centric conversations, I affirm this belief to others, and to myself. Slowly, but surely, it becomes entrenched in my own self-conception. Then, one day, I wake up. It is 9am, a bright Sunday morning, and my stomach is rumbling. My roommates suggest getting brunch, and I decide to tag along. I order a towering stack of banana pancakes, dripping with fake syrup, and hoover them all. I feel great. Why haven’t I done this before? Because I allowed my conviction, arbitrarily made, to lead me and cloud my decision making. Sure, maybe I still don’t want breakfast every morning – but I now realize my conviction against breakfast never made much sense. By defining myself in absolute terms, I deprived myself of experience, enjoyment, and a truer understanding of who I am.
Many of our convictions are small, like disavowing breakfast. Others are larger, definitions of our personality, of our wants and needs. These are the convictions that we often define ourselves by, and bring erroneously to bear when making decisions, justifying emotions or pondering our place in the world. These convictions are grounded with a great inertia – our desire for stability. These convictions are the foundation for many major decisions, they have led us for years. I often felt an ineffable fear of challenging these convictions. If I challenged them and discovered them untrue, I risked toppling my whole sense of self. This fear often manifested in defensiveness. When I or someone else began challenging the tenets which I relied on for stability, I would become irrational and opposed to mature discussion. Exacerbating this, I believe, was the fact that many of my most towering pillars of conviction were built and fortified to guard against my deepest insecurities.
Fear of instability, loss of self-image, and forced acknowledgement of insecurities kept me from challenging my personal convictions. This fear made me defensive and irrational at times. It made me unhappy often. It also prevented me from truly understanding myself, so many of my decisions relied on the weakness of logic which I talked about earlier. I felt adrift without knowing why.
Finding and dismantling these pillars of convictions is difficult. It remains a daily practice, and can leave me feeling disheartened. But, ultimately I know myself better for it, and feel many times more sure of myself than I have in the past.
2. Acting on my hard-earned understanding. It is all well and good to understand yourself. Well and great, even. But understanding must be accompanied by action to have effect. For example, someone might know that their short-fuse is the cause of many problems in their life, but unless they take action on that knowledge, the ill effects of their short fuse will continue and thus, happiness will remain away.
Taking effective action is a bitch, it is hard. It may seem that when we understand the roots of our emotions, it should be easy to feed the positive ones and regulate the negative. But, not so. Like convictions, habits are deeply rooted, and the path of least resistance is most often the rutted one. To act on an understanding of oneself requires deep resolve for change, and a considered plan for how that change will happen. I know, to some degree, how this looks for me – I certainly don’t know enough to instruct anyone else. Sorry.
3. Staying on the lookout for happiness. When I do this, I am the happiest person I can be. Unfortunately, I often do not do this. Like the rest, it requires concerted work. It is not necessarily that we are on the lookout for unhappiness, though sometimes we are. It is rather that we are most often on the lookout for what we expect, and therefore are seldom surprised, and often miss opportunities to be happy.
It is human tendency to identify patterns in life. These patterns in turn create expectations which are hugely influential in how we perceive the world. Most often, I think, expectations are more influential to our perception of events than the facts of the events themselves.
When we meet lifelong friends for dinner, we expect our conversations to go somewhat like they’ve gone before – maybe not in terms of subject matter or conclusions, but in terms of cadence and the rules of interaction we have with those people. Imagine you wake up bleary eyed in the middle of the night, really having to pee. You could probably get up and make your way to the toilet in complete darkness without ever switching on a light. Perhaps you’d bump into the doorframe and shoot a little wide of the bowl, but all in all, you could empty your bladder and get back into bed without much incident. You can do this because you’ve made the same walk 1000 times, so you know exactly what to expect. But, what if on that 1,001st walk, there’s a skateboard between your bed and the bathroom and you end up with a broken wrist? What if there’s a delicious bar of chocolate by the sink and you walk right by it, blinded by reliance on your own expectations?
The human tendency to seek patterns and act on them makes sense. If we were constantly forming new beliefs with every turn of our heads, it would be disorienting and unfulfilling. We need confidence in our expectations to get through most of our daily lives. When I say to look for happiness, all I mean is being sensitive to new opportunities when possible. If an old friend mentions a new interest off hand, don’t just let it slide by, follow up and maybe it can be something you share. If your see hot banana peppers in your favorite Italian Sandwich when they’ve never been there before, take a bite. Maybe you’ll love them. It is not a matter of going out of your way to find happiness and novelty at all costs, but a question of being on the lookout for all the goodness that is constantly in motion around us. Life is not stationary. Discover your world each day and ask questions when you can.
So, back to the initial question – why start a blog? For me, the answer is, once again, threefold.
1. Why not.
2. Lately, I have found myself straying away from the basic foundations of my happiness and getting caught up again in the appeal of logic-based decisions. I have felt myself becoming unhappy without taking the time to slow down and consider why. With this first post, I have already found myself returning to ground. I’d like this blog to offer me that opportunity when I need it, and also be a place to question myself and whatever other topics seem interesting.
3. As a record? Something I can look back on? A way to question new beliefs by understanding past ones? Motivation to write? A place to engage? Each of those things, but especially this: now that this thing exists, I can finally say, Welcome to my blog.
Nick.