Posts tagged with "reflection"

The Self

I don’t know if you have ever observed this strange thing, the self. Often the more you look the more it does­n’t seem to be like it, and the more you look the more it isn’t it.
…
If you con­cen­trate on look­ing at your­self, you will find that your self will grad­u­al­ly sep­a­rate into many star­tling forms. So if I have to make a sum­ma­ry of myself, it ter­ri­fies me. I don’t know which of the many faces rep­re­sents me more and the more close­ly I look the clear­er the trans­for­ma­tions become, and final­ly only bewil­der­ment remains.

—nar­ra­tor, Soul Mountain

Out of the few things that I do well, it’s know­ing myself that I take the most pride in.

Or believ­ing that I know myself at least.

I often feel as if I know myself enough to under­stand the work­ings of my sub­con­scious. I think it’s ludi­crous when some­one tells me that they have me “fig­ured out” and this image they have of me isn’t the same as my own image of myself.

Yet how do I know which is cor­rect? As a human, one is nat­u­ral­ly biased when look­ing at any­thing, and when look­ing at one­self this bias becomes even worse. The most that one can do is rec­og­nize one’s bias, and present it so that oth­ers can under­stand the per­spec­tive of each opin­ion.

All that I can say for sure is that I will nev­er be cor­rect in what I think of myself. Everything that I speak about, when relat­ing to my per­son­al­i­ty, my ideas, my thoughts, my mind­set, might be total­ly wrong.

And know­ing this has become more impor­tant than know­ing myself.

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.

*25*

I told Aaron a few months ago that I held his morals and atti­tudes towards rela­tion­ships as a per­son­al goal. Knowing him for a while and being through a few odd rela­tion­ships issues with him has made me real­ize that he has a very healthy mind­set. I’m not say­ing that there are bad or wrong ways of view­ing rela­tion­ships, I sim­ply found that his ideas fit with my over­all life goals very well. Even though I haven’t always stuck to these lofty stan­dards in my own rela­tion­ship expe­ri­ence, I still try to main­tain this set of ideals.

I know a few peo­ple whose main goal in life is to get mar­ried. I ques­tioned them about why they have this goal, and they would tell me that they sim­ply don’t know. I’ve been through all types of rela­tion­ship mind­sets before, all fair­ly dif­fer­ent, all from dif­fer­ent man­i­fes­ta­tions of my per­son­al­i­ty. There were phas­es such as “I want to be in a rela­tion­ship”, “I don’t think I’ll ever be in a rela­tion­ship”, “I’m unsat­is­fied with this rela­tion­ship”, “I’ve giv­en up on rela­tion­ships”, “I’ll be in this rela­tion­ship for the rest of my life” (haha­ha), “I don’t want to be in a rela­tion­ship”, and it goes on and on.

Right now I’m not even sure what I want. I think a rela­tion­ship would be great but unnec­es­sary. I’ve stopped being depen­dent on some­one to com­plete me, stopped look­ing at life as a dead­line, and have recon­sid­ered almost every­thing about what I want.

Being able to do so has made me think much more clear­ly and act with more con­vic­tion.

Scattered Veil

I’ve real­ized that I have a hard time look­ing in the eyes of peo­ple I can’t stand.

It’s as if I don’t want to be dis­hon­est to them. That no mat­ter how much I hate them, I still feel like they deserve to know the truth. At least I can be…hon­ourable about this, inde­pen­dent of how I feel about the per­son.

I hold hon­esty at a very basic lev­el of human integri­ty. I can’t believe how many peo­ple I know who pre­tend to be friends with peo­ple they can’t stand. It all seems so pho­ny, unless they’re forced to be friend­ly due to spe­cif­ic cir­cum­stances (such as being mar­ried into a new fam­i­ly, mov­ing in with unknown room­mates, etc.). Sometimes the false friend­li­ness gives peo­ple the wrong idea, and they start to hang around even more, and every­thing just gets worse.

I’m glad that I find it hard to lie to some­one, although I’m also a lit­tle scared by the fact that it’s so hard for me to hide some­thing such as this. I’ve always been a ter­ri­ble inter­preter of body lan­guage, and in turn have nev­er had much luck with hiding/manipulating my own. Of course I can hide it when I real­ly want to, but it’s a lot hard­er when I don’t give a shit about the per­son. Most peo­ple, I don’t care enough about to actu­al­ly hide any­thing.

And it shows.

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.