Over the course of my MA, every time I returned home for a visit, I would engage in the same ritual: I would stand in front of the bookshelf in my bedroom as Freud, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and others would stare back at me mockingly. I would swear that once I had the time, after my studies, I would read these classics that had accumulated from various BA philosophy and political theory classes. As it turns out, the classics are not so thrilling in their original form. Sparknotes and Wikipedia were invented for a reason. However, I recently decided to give Nietzsche a shot. Have you ever discovered a work that describes everything your mind has organically conjured and all that you believe in a manner that is so succinct, so perfectly phrased, that the only explanation is that you are, in fact, the reincarnation of the author? I may have been Nietzsche in my past life. As my supportive sister put it, when discussing my new blog, “You can’t say or think something that hasn’t been said or thought before; you can only repackage it.” Despite being wholeheartedly against this theory (as it can only lead one to submit to inability and not create at all), I found it to be true and comforting as I opened Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. I had been trying to put into words precisely what he relays in the initial polemic of the book. Rather than be discouraged by the lack of originality in my philosophy, I found this discovery to be very comforting. For one, if someone (and Nietzsche, no less) has preempted my thought, it doesn’t mean that the thought did not develop organically. Additionally, I found that this discovery only validated my opinions, which is precisely what this blog is all about: realizing that one is not alone in his thoughts. Anyhow, back to the issue at hand. Rather than attempt to put into words what I’ve been thinking lately, I have provided you with the direct quotation from the Genealogy, in which it is phrased more concisely. Enjoy. I certainly did.
“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and for a good reason. We have never sought ourselves- how then should it happen that we find ourselves one day? It had rightly been said: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are forever underway toward them, as born winged animals and honey-gatherers of the spirit, concerned with all our heart about only one thing- “bringing home” something. As for the rest of life, the so-called “experiences”- who of us even has enough seriousness for them? Or enough time? In such matters I’m afraid we were never really “with it”: we just don’t have our heart there- or even our ear! Rather, much as a divinely distracted, self-absorbed person into whose ear the bell has just boomed its twelve strokes of noon suddenly awakens and wonders, “what did it actually toll just now?” so we rub our ears afterwards and ask, completely amazed, completely disconcerted, “what did we actually experience just now?” still more: “who are we actually?” and count up, afterwards, as stated, all twelve quavering bellstrokes of our experience, of our life, of our being- alas! And miscount in the process…We remain of necessity strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we must mistake ourselves, for us the maxim reads to all eternity: “each is furthest from himself,”- with respect to ourselves we are not “knowers”. – Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
I could write a novel dissecting this paragraph but since I’m a humanitarian, I will not.
How incredible is this though!? The notions that have been plaguing my mind all in one breath..well maybe five. For one, this obsession with finding ourselves. We travel all over the world, give our money to different therapists and fortune tellers, and spend our entire lives in contemplation (well, at least some of us do) in order to find our elusive selves, when we have never really sought ourselves to begin with. We not only succumb to distractions from ourselves, we search them out, because “we must mistake ourselves” in order to survive. We are searching for the “experience”, for the truth, for living, and all the while we are sleeping. All the while we choose to remain sleeping and not hear “the bell” that tolls, our experiences, our life. Our heart is not "there", in the experiences. We are not present in our lives. Finally, at the end of our lives we recall the experiences and attempt to count the tolls of the bell that we heard while asleep, as Nietzsche phrases it. Even so, we “miscount”. It’s beautiful, and sad, and so true.
What does it mean to know oneself and why do we choose to avoid ourselves? Why do we look for distractions from ourselves in religion (according to Nietzsche) or in our careers or in our ideologies? What is so terrifying about ourselves? I am obsessed with the concept of finding out who it is that I am. Over the years, I have stripped myself of various beliefs, ideologies, and attachments that I believed had defined me. At least the obvious ones. In doing so, I feel I’ve come closer to understanding this self. Yet the more I uncover, the more I discover that I am eclectic beyond my understanding; I am, not one, but multiple walking contradictions. The more I try to understand myself with my rational mind, the more I realize what an amateur tool this mind is. The things that I am, so to speak, are infinite in number and as I try to pidgeon-hole myself, I become more confused and lost.
Maybe this potential of infinity is indeed what terrifies us. We are afraid of what we cannot possibly grasp. Perhaps understanding ourselves is equatable to grasping the universe or anything else that is endless and infinite. Perhaps in the vast expanse of stars, we see ourselves. Perhaps this explains the mixture of awe and warm familiarity we experience when looking up at the night sky. As one of my favourite authors, Tom Robbins, posits, humanity has created concepts such as the End of Days because our rational minds are incapable of grasping the unbounded and immeasurable.
So in the spirit of positivity (not passivity), what would happen if we were just ok with that? If we just thought, “I don’t need to be one way or the other, I can be all ways and all things…I don’t need to know them all or even understand them all.”? I can simply discover all that I am as I go along. This could be fun.
Love
Love. The all-encompassing and permeating notion. It took me a long time to release myself from the shame that comes with needing love, partnership, companionship. Not that I have. It’s sort of an eternal struggle. But, the fact that almost every song, movie and conversation one overhears in a coffee shop is touched by the notion of love leads me to believe that we are all obsessed with the elusive concept. The funny thing is, I don’t think any of us has any idea what the hell it means. I think we all want to be understood, and to know that another person knows us almost as well as we know ourselves. I think we all want to find someone that will make us feel that we’re not alone in this world, and prove it to everyone else by holding hands as we walk down the street. I mean that in the most un-cynical way possible. Really! Those of us who are “relationship people” think love means for someone else to fill that void in ourselves that we could never fill ourselves. Others think it means co-dependence and a sense of familiarity or comfort. Others still confuse it with lust. I certainly don’t claim to know. In fact, I probably know to a lesser extent than most. But, what I do know is that one of the most ludicrous acts we engage in is trying to bottle the vast concept of love into the tiny vessel of time. I’ve fallen in love with someone without ever seeing him before. I’ve failed at loving someone who gave me all that he was and all that he had. I’ve fallen in love with a man in an instant. I just knew. I’d known I’d loved him before I met him, as if I’d known him for lifetimes. And maybe I had. One can fall in love multiple times with numerous “soul-mates” and maybe even simultaneously. I believe that’s possible. Although, I admit that I’m still an old-school romantic and I do believe in “the one”.
I fall in love fairly easily. I’ve always been told that this is a weakness. This is one of the big lies. It is a strength to fall in love with someone so easily, to see all the beauty in another person and be so naively blind to the ugliness that may lie within them. That innocence is a beautiful thing. The point is that the ability to feel real love is not determined by a period of time or by knowing what a person’s favourite cereal is or that he makes annoying mouth sounds when he chews. At the risk of sounding overly poetic, it’s about knowing and loving someone’s soul in a way that is inexplicable with our rational mind’s mechanisms for acquiring knowledge. It’s about knowing something that you could not possibly have learnt. When you are truly in love, it doesn’t feel like you’re discovering something new about the other, it’s like you’re remembering who they are. That’s why when you meet someone you love and you’re open to it, it feels like a reunion and not like an introduction.
Maybe that’s what this epidemic of loneliness is all about. Just go with me here. Maybe, we are just missing that person or persons we left somewhere. We can’t remember them but we know they’re there and that they’re looking for us too without even knowing it. The part that hurts with yearning in our heart, hurts in theirs too. Perhaps, the antidote to the pervasive loneliness that haunts us is the one we’ve already met in some alternate lifetime. This sounds like a line out of some cheesy movie. But, to be truly honest, that’s who I’m waiting for. I suppose that any man who has ever entered into my life would tell you that those are some pretty big shoes to fill and I suppose this could sound fairly delusional. I could be paving my way to eternal loneliness with this uncompromising and perhaps childish way of looking at love. But, to quote my dear friend Shauna, “I’m gonna marry Superman.”
I fall in love fairly easily. I’ve always been told that this is a weakness. This is one of the big lies. It is a strength to fall in love with someone so easily, to see all the beauty in another person and be so naively blind to the ugliness that may lie within them. That innocence is a beautiful thing. The point is that the ability to feel real love is not determined by a period of time or by knowing what a person’s favourite cereal is or that he makes annoying mouth sounds when he chews. At the risk of sounding overly poetic, it’s about knowing and loving someone’s soul in a way that is inexplicable with our rational mind’s mechanisms for acquiring knowledge. It’s about knowing something that you could not possibly have learnt. When you are truly in love, it doesn’t feel like you’re discovering something new about the other, it’s like you’re remembering who they are. That’s why when you meet someone you love and you’re open to it, it feels like a reunion and not like an introduction.
Maybe that’s what this epidemic of loneliness is all about. Just go with me here. Maybe, we are just missing that person or persons we left somewhere. We can’t remember them but we know they’re there and that they’re looking for us too without even knowing it. The part that hurts with yearning in our heart, hurts in theirs too. Perhaps, the antidote to the pervasive loneliness that haunts us is the one we’ve already met in some alternate lifetime. This sounds like a line out of some cheesy movie. But, to be truly honest, that’s who I’m waiting for. I suppose that any man who has ever entered into my life would tell you that those are some pretty big shoes to fill and I suppose this could sound fairly delusional. I could be paving my way to eternal loneliness with this uncompromising and perhaps childish way of looking at love. But, to quote my dear friend Shauna, “I’m gonna marry Superman.”
Put Yourself Out There (Whatever that means)
So I previously spoke of the need to alleviate loneliness. I was speaking with my hairdresser the other day about the difficulties of moving to a new city and how it becomes more difficult to make friends as one gets older. People inevitably couple off and begin their slow submersion into their one bedroom apartments never to be seen again. Just a note on that. Please remind me of my hypocrisy if/when I become a member of said couple in the near or distant future. However, being single and not having regular sex grants me certain advantages, one of which is the right to honestly criticize “relationship people”. I am not referring to people in relationships. I am referring to “relationship people”. There is a difference. I have been in these types of relationships before and am thus aware that it is unnecessary to become a “relationship person”. It is unnecessary to lose all individual identity when one enters into a union. I understand the argument: if you know you’re getting laid at the end of the night, what’s the point of getting out of your sweat pants and leaving the house. No wait. I don’t. Get out of your fucking jammies and leave the house assholes!
Anyway, I was talking to my hairdresser. He was telling me tales of how the ubiquitous loneliness had touched his life and how difficult it was to meet a partner or even just to meet new friends. However, he actually did something about it which is why this is worth writing about. He joined different clubs. He learnt how to dragon-boat, he joined a curling beer league (I didn’t know that existed either), he got into yoga. I really admire the act of changing a reality that makes you unhappy. I’m not gonna get crazy and profess to try new things myself, cause let’s face it, I’m too lazy to keep up with such a commitment. However, he did motivate me to bring my computer out to a public coffee shop and “put myself out there”, meaning be around others of my species. I must say it feels good. Plus, people think I’m doing something important as I intensely type into my laptop.
A good lesson to add to the list today: Put myself “out there”. And smile while I do it because it may attract some positive energy. Or I could look like the creepy girl smiling to herself for no apparent reason.
Anyway, I was talking to my hairdresser. He was telling me tales of how the ubiquitous loneliness had touched his life and how difficult it was to meet a partner or even just to meet new friends. However, he actually did something about it which is why this is worth writing about. He joined different clubs. He learnt how to dragon-boat, he joined a curling beer league (I didn’t know that existed either), he got into yoga. I really admire the act of changing a reality that makes you unhappy. I’m not gonna get crazy and profess to try new things myself, cause let’s face it, I’m too lazy to keep up with such a commitment. However, he did motivate me to bring my computer out to a public coffee shop and “put myself out there”, meaning be around others of my species. I must say it feels good. Plus, people think I’m doing something important as I intensely type into my laptop.
A good lesson to add to the list today: Put myself “out there”. And smile while I do it because it may attract some positive energy. Or I could look like the creepy girl smiling to herself for no apparent reason.
Be Free of Judgment
I debated whether to write a little bit about myself, but given that anyone reading this probably knows my history and would just like to know what the hell is going on in my head, I won’t bore you with the physical details. Suffice it to say that I have recently moved back home after living in Israel for the past couple years and I have a tendency to make lists. More often than not, these lists consist of goals and objectives for my own self-improvement. Lately, my objective has been to remember to be young and to play. Has anyone else forgotten how to do this? If so, has anyone else asked themselves, “When did I have to write down ‘Remember to play!’ in order to remind myself?” How depressing.
My immediate reaction is to think back to my childhood in a fog of nostalgia. But, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t remember remembering to play then either. I was a pretty serious kid when I come to think of it. I recall arguing with my teachers, as the sixth grade student council representative, about the rights of the sixth graders to determine, for themselves, whether to spend their lunch hours inside or outside and about the cultural sensitivity of having a Christmas tree in the front hall, but no recognition of the other holidays celebrated by the student body. No joke.
But the important point here is the trick my mind plays on me in that process of remembering myself as a playful and carefree youth. The memory of our history is very different from the reality of our history. It seems to me that we cognitively manipulate our memories in order to create a history that makes sense with our current reality. This seems sort of silly. All I’ve really done in this process is reinforce the thought that something is wrong with me in that I can’t remember to play naturally.
Have I lost you already? It’s exhausting, I know.
Basically, my question is this: is this rewriting of our personal history a process that everyone undergoes or is it only true for the masochists among us? How does one release oneself from this cognitive trap? The only solution I can fathom is to free oneself from the judgment of “I don’t know how to be light and youthful”. I, for one, cannot just say to myself remember how to play and be done with it. There is always a judgment that goes along with it or a point of failure. So here is a good lesson for today and one more line to add to the list. Be free of judgment…of myself and of others.
My immediate reaction is to think back to my childhood in a fog of nostalgia. But, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t remember remembering to play then either. I was a pretty serious kid when I come to think of it. I recall arguing with my teachers, as the sixth grade student council representative, about the rights of the sixth graders to determine, for themselves, whether to spend their lunch hours inside or outside and about the cultural sensitivity of having a Christmas tree in the front hall, but no recognition of the other holidays celebrated by the student body. No joke.
But the important point here is the trick my mind plays on me in that process of remembering myself as a playful and carefree youth. The memory of our history is very different from the reality of our history. It seems to me that we cognitively manipulate our memories in order to create a history that makes sense with our current reality. This seems sort of silly. All I’ve really done in this process is reinforce the thought that something is wrong with me in that I can’t remember to play naturally.
Have I lost you already? It’s exhausting, I know.
Basically, my question is this: is this rewriting of our personal history a process that everyone undergoes or is it only true for the masochists among us? How does one release oneself from this cognitive trap? The only solution I can fathom is to free oneself from the judgment of “I don’t know how to be light and youthful”. I, for one, cannot just say to myself remember how to play and be done with it. There is always a judgment that goes along with it or a point of failure. So here is a good lesson for today and one more line to add to the list. Be free of judgment…of myself and of others.
Allow Me to Introduce Myself.
Ok so here’s the schtick. I have been anti-blogs for, well, ever. Citing the fact that people’s inherent exhibitionist instincts (which have become flagrantly apparent in the age of the social media revolution) creep me out, I’ve derided blogging as a pathetic call for mass attention. Well, look at me now. LOOK AT ME!!!!
I now believe that, apart from our instinctual exhibitionist tendencies, this wave of new social outlets, and the mass use of them, taps in to something much deeper than a call for attention. I know what you’re thinking. NO, the change of heart is not (only) a result of my new blog. I could only realize this greater meaning at a very difficult point of transition in my life, a sort of coming of age. Only when I was faced with one existential crisis after another and a deep and penetrating loneliness, the likes of which I had never known, did I understand the core of this social enlightenment: loneliness is the greatest challenge of the human condition. All that we do, at its core, is a means to alleviate that loneliness. The need to be loved, to be a part of something, to attach a greater meaning to our lives than that of its individual importance is a point of connection that we all share. How ironic. No one is alone in their loneliness.
I am a 24-year old woman. I have not one, but two, useless degrees and a hell of a lot of time on my hands. I spend more time analyzing myself, my actions and my thoughts than I actually do or think. Until of course I run out of things to analyze, at which point I peek my head out into the world of the present and gather some more material, only to retreat into neurotic analysis once more. So, I am operating under two assumptions in writing this blog.
1. That anyone gives a shit. :)
2. That this obsessive analytical behavior is true of many people and maybe by putting out the crazy and eclectic thoughts that race through my mind, someone will realize (and hopefully one of those someones will be me) that they are not alone. Not in their thoughts and not in their loneliness. At the very least, it could be entertaining.
I now believe that, apart from our instinctual exhibitionist tendencies, this wave of new social outlets, and the mass use of them, taps in to something much deeper than a call for attention. I know what you’re thinking. NO, the change of heart is not (only) a result of my new blog. I could only realize this greater meaning at a very difficult point of transition in my life, a sort of coming of age. Only when I was faced with one existential crisis after another and a deep and penetrating loneliness, the likes of which I had never known, did I understand the core of this social enlightenment: loneliness is the greatest challenge of the human condition. All that we do, at its core, is a means to alleviate that loneliness. The need to be loved, to be a part of something, to attach a greater meaning to our lives than that of its individual importance is a point of connection that we all share. How ironic. No one is alone in their loneliness.
I am a 24-year old woman. I have not one, but two, useless degrees and a hell of a lot of time on my hands. I spend more time analyzing myself, my actions and my thoughts than I actually do or think. Until of course I run out of things to analyze, at which point I peek my head out into the world of the present and gather some more material, only to retreat into neurotic analysis once more. So, I am operating under two assumptions in writing this blog.
1. That anyone gives a shit. :)
2. That this obsessive analytical behavior is true of many people and maybe by putting out the crazy and eclectic thoughts that race through my mind, someone will realize (and hopefully one of those someones will be me) that they are not alone. Not in their thoughts and not in their loneliness. At the very least, it could be entertaining.
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