Posts tagged with "logic"

Reversal: Part 2 (The Floundering Mindset)

Out of the storm of life I have borne away only a few ideas — and not one feel­ing. For a long time now I have been liv­ing, not with my heart, but with my head. I weigh, ana­lyze my own pas­sions and actions with severe curios­i­ty, but with­out sym­pa­thy.

—Pechorin, A Hero of Our Time

When I was younger, I decid­ed that I want­ed to cast all my emo­tion aside, because at the time I knew noth­ing but pain. I set this as my goal, and start­ed to work towards a ster­ile, cere­bral mind­set. I want­ed to feel noth­ing, and this idea fol­lowed me through to uni­ver­si­ty.

At this time, I nev­er believed that I was com­plete­ly suc­cess­ful; I still felt too much. However, as my sit­u­a­tion changed, as I met new peo­ple with good hearts and minds, I expe­ri­enced what hap­pi­ness was like. I was nev­er sat­is­fied though, nev­er hap­py enough, and always want­ed more but could nev­er achieve it. Suddenly, it felt as if my cere­bral goal was too suc­cess­ful, and I was stuck, I was numb.

I’ve gone from one extreme to the oth­er, from want­i­ng noth­ing to want­i­ng every­thing. In both cas­es I was a fail­ure, but it’s only now that I real­ize that suc­cess would have assured­ly meant no turn­ing back. I believe that when a cer­tain extent is reached, one becomes igno­rant to any­thing that could pos­si­bly change one­self. Now I under­stand the bal­ance, the dichoto­my that absolute­ly must exist in order to have a healthy mind.

And things are much bet­ter this way.

Mind Muffler

It always inter­ests me to learn how some peo­ple are changed so sud­den­ly in their lives. An inci­dent, whether it’s retire­ment, grad­u­a­tion, death, or any­thing of such a mag­ni­tude, cause some to have new rev­e­la­tions or epipha­nies. The fact that it takes some­thing as dras­tic as these sit­u­a­tions to affect some peo­ple seems seems a lit­tle odd to me.

Do these peo­ple not think at all in their dai­ly lives? Do they go through one day to the next with­out look­ing at the big pic­ture, with­out see­ing some sort of per­spec­tive?

I think I’m gen­er­al­ly unaf­fect­ed by such extreme events because of the fact that I try to find mean­ing in almost every­thing I expe­ri­ence (risk­ing pre­ten­sion). It ends up being that some­thing like the loss of a favorite shirt can affect me as much as fail­ing an entire uni­ver­si­ty course. I feel as if I learn enough about myself from both events. As a result of this, I some­times change on a day to day basis, although it’s gen­er­al­ly on a minis­cule lev­el and takes a while before it all builds up into any­thing notice­able.

Of course, this also means that very lit­tle ends up sur­pris­ing me. I’m rarely shocked by any­thing, and often feel like my emo­tions have been lev­eled off, per­haps numb or sim­ply accus­tomed to change. I don’t get dras­ti­cal­ly affect­ed any­more, and in turn, can think and act clear­ly accord­ing to my set of log­ic. The only thing that ends up over­com­ing my cere­bral­i­ty is hate.

And love.