I’ve leaned hard on certain methods for accessing people; moving is a great destroyer of close relationships, and I’ve wreaked this havoc by choice or by requirement on my social life over and over. Therefore, sports teams and workplaces have been key watering holes in otherwise partially deserted landscapes that I’ve left behind before they’ve vegetated. One gives up a degree of design authority when entering longstanding social territories and I’ve been tempted to allow my desire for control to lead to a sense of alienation from pre-existing structures. It’s a vague way of saying that I’m touchy and impatient.
While I’ve felt that there must be environments that are more suited to “who I am” than others, I believe that I need to develop a greater level of acceptance rather than a more rapid pace of environmental experimentation. This notion is as relevant for any given group that I might be member of as well as for situations where I am limited in my memberships (as today, this particularly August afternoon, I am). The desire to economize, to make decisions that result in better outcomes more closely associated with one’s values, is the great farce of our time. Can’t there be principles and notions that will end up in feeling better and getting what one wants? Maybe, but attempting to live one’s live in alignment with such principles and notions is unnecessary, particularly in the extreme. But what is a Western-educated, behavioral economics-reading, business-ish career person supposed to do about this most important of qualities that turns out to be antithetical to living? It’s a question that I was hoping to explore further with my father before he died (not that he would have agreed about the antithetical to living part).
I often feel the urge to simplify, to only experience a few things that are most great with a few people who are most wonderful. I read this book called Essentialism that was convincing in articulating this as a reasonable way to live. But I find that I become aloof to most things as my essentialist way. I avoid things that I have open questions about and fail to say yes. I become a narrative essentialist: looking for the simplest, best story that life can reflect and wishing to relentlessly attach to the things that fit such a narrative and detaching from those that don’t. But here’s the problem: life seems essentially chaotic and messy, unable to be economized effectively or simplified efficiently (and wishing for it to be otherwise creates expectations rifts that one can’t help but fall into (or at least I can’t help it)). Messy chaos isn’t exactly a way of being that I know how to plan for, beside accepting that my level of willing & prediction are dramatically smaller than the pop economists would lead me to believe.
The best I can do is reduce the amount of time I spend interrogating the world around me, demanding that it tell me why it is the way it is and implying in my questions that it’s the wrong way. This is the way that sound about angry young men have been written, about the interrogators and the over-confident that everything one sees ought to be different (not in a specific way, but in a vague way). A couple days of feeling dark and writing dark poems successfully lead me to the opposite of anger: the feeling that there isn’t any particular way things should or shouldn’t be, and something beyond acceptance that is closer to a noun than a verb.
Roman Ryan 