Posts tagged with "life"

The Tao Tattoo

Part of The Tao Tattoo Series

  1. The Meaning
  2. The Experience
  3. The Background
  4. Tattwo

Thumbnail: The Tao tattoo

Thumbnail: The Tao tattoo macro 

To remind me to keep my chin up.

To remind me not to sweat the small stuff.

To remind me to live in accor­dance with the nature of things.

To remind me to stay bal­anced.

To remind me to decrease my wants.

To remind me to indulge myself every now and then.

To remind me that every­thing is as it should be.

To remind me to stop com­par­ing myself to oth­ers.

To remind me not to use force against the world, and embrace the way of the uni­verse.

To remind me to fol­low my own nature, and not the trap­pings of life.

To remind me that noth­ing real­ly mat­ters.

To remind me to have no claims to life.

To remind me to be spon­ta­neous, delib­er­ate, watch­ful, rev­er­ent, hum­ble, pure, and accept­ing.

To remind me that heav­en is found on earth.

Awakening: The Reborn Dreamer

I wake up every day look­ing at Death, and you know what? He ain’t half bad.

—Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp

Its not until you lose every­thing that you are free to do any­thing.

—Tyler Durden, Fight Club

I used to take pride in the fact that I felt like I could die sat­is­fied any day. I was at a place in my life where I could­n’t ask for more, and there was a tremen­dous sense of over­all sat­is­fac­tion. I had every­thing that I deserved. After that, all I had left to expe­ri­ence, every fall morn­ing caught or tear shed, was a bonus. Of course, the clos­est I had ever come to death was a minor case of pneu­moth­o­rax, which I imag­ine is as fatal as pinch­ing one’s skin between two Lego pieces while build­ing the Death Star, so this feel­ing was nev­er actu­al­ly put to the test. I’m sure I’d feel dif­fer­ent­ly if I ever came fright­en­ing­ly close to the end of my life, although just how much remains a mys­tery.

Perhaps this grew from a cogent sense of frailty, per­pet­u­at­ed by all the sto­ries of freak acci­dents echoed through­out the media. The stu­dent who impaled his heart on a num­ber 2 pen­cil while try­ing to catch a foot­ball in the mid­dle of class. The gen­er­al who drowned in a pool of his own blood from a nose­bleed on his wed­ding night. Even the pres­i­dent of the United States almost choked to death on a pret­zel. To dis­tance myself was the only way I could deal with it.

The prob­lem, I’ve only recent­ly dis­cov­ered, was that this left me alien­at­ed and unat­tached. I have no dreams, noth­ing to live for. Not even a goal to work towards. During high-school, the goal was to get into a uni­ver­si­ty. After uni­ver­si­ty, the goal was to get a ful­fill­ing job. After the job was the house. Now that I own a house, it feels like the rest of my life has been laid out in front of me. No risks, no sur­pris­es. I appre­ci­ate every­thing that I’ve been giv­en, but it feels like it’s been a lit­tle too easy. Even my most sig­nif­i­cant goal was rather sud­den­ly accom­plished this year. As Logan Pearsall Smith once wrote in his book Afterthoughts, “How many of our day­dreams would dark­en into night­mares if there seemed any dan­ger of their com­ing true!”. A simul­ta­ne­ous ful­fill­ment and dis­sat­is­fac­tion.

I pre­sent­ed this prob­lem to Pat, and from his infi­nite wis­dom (at 24, no less) I real­ized that one should nev­er live for what might hap­pen. Otherwise, a per­son would go crazy. Of course, to tru­ly live this way, it does­n’t hurt to be a bit of a fatal­ist. Having this belief means that one can only do the best that they can, and to go means that it was meant to be.

For now, I’ve been keep­ing myself occu­pied, until I can fig­ure out what I want in the last rest of my life. Blessed is the per­son who is too busy to wor­ry in the day­time and too sleepy to wor­ry at night. It’s only now that I’ve dis­cov­ered that I need a few dreams to sur­vive.

And I can only hope to nev­er reach them.

The Awakening Series

  1. Introduction
  2. Cause
  3. The Reborn Dreamer

The Next Level, Part 2

It’s get­ting eas­i­er to write again. Ideas are com­ing a lit­tle more flu­id­ly, and aren’t quite as strain­ing to devel­op any­more. Perhaps there’s been an excess of inspi­ra­tion in the last while, from the music that keeps me mov­ing, to the peo­ple I inter­act with, to the tem­per­a­ture of the sea­son, to the words in the books that I’ve been read­ing with rel­ish.

Life is a series of sen­sa­tions that gal­va­nize, encour­age, pro­voke, and teach.

I can nev­er seem to get it all down.

Living On Borrowed Time (Bonus)

An old nurs­ery rhyme pro­posed that life is but a dream. If Dr. Leary were alive today, he would add, most like­ly in an LSD induced state, that we’re just an imag­i­na­tion of our­selves. I have a hard time agree­ing with either apho­rism, but even if they were true, it would­n’t mat­ter.

A cer­tain glut­to­nous cat once mused, exact­ly 19 years ago today, that life can be com­pared to some­thing found on the din­ner table. Perhaps the most famous com­par­i­son, how­ev­er, was by a tech­ni­cal­ly bor­der­line defi­cient per­son who said that life is like a box of choco­lates, because you nev­er know what you’re going to get. As things go on, one real­izes that there isn’t one com­par­i­son that’s more valid than anoth­er.

Even an out­spo­ken Queensbridge rap­per has flowed, “You a killer or a hus­tler, deal­er or cus­tomer / Gangsta or buster, young­ster or old nig­ga / A weed head, a coke snif­fer / You rich or a broke nig­ga / Know you all relate to this shit that I wrote nig­gas / Life is what you make it nig­ga”, and I tend not to dis­agree.

For me, it now seems like life is sim­ply a test.

More impor­tant­ly, how­ev­er, from here until the end, no mat­ter what, life is gravy.

One Of Those Days

I’m hav­ing one of those days, actu­al­ly, one of those weeks where I can’t seem to write any­thing down. I have all these ideas float­ing around in my head with­out the words to fol­low through. Maybe it’s because I don’t exact­ly know what I’m feel­ing, like a bit­ter­sweet mix in the palate, or an indis­tin­guish­able taste. For once I’ve start­ed to take con­trol of things, start­ed to be pro-active instead of reac­tive. Started lis­ten­ing to hope­ful, inspir­ing, ener­getic music. I’ve real­ized that I have the abil­i­ty to point my life in the direc­tion I want to go, that I can’t rely on oth­ers to make me hap­py, that I can start liv­ing for myself now.

And it’s all new to me.