Zorba invoked a very specific feeling for me: FREEDOM. Reading it as I got situated into life again in New York, it provided me the sense of escape from reality I had on my trip to India. The feeling that life goes on without you. And how comfortable that is, because you’re free to do what you like and truly understand how your unique ripple affects the flow of things.
Apathy has become such a vice and the majority of time I believe it is. Occasionally though, you get a glimpse of the beauty within apathy, seeing in it not despair but rather a serene peace knowing that if nothing matters, then you can simply be yourself.
Zorba keeps at this theme with a nonchalant frivolity of letting things be and being one with them by letting yourself be. You get the feeling that you can’t understand something by controlling it. Instead you must set yourself free of the biases surrounding you and understand where you personally stand. Realize where your confidence comes from so when the storm comes you know if and how you’ll weather it. You can’t understand life so free yourself to the chaos it presents. Don’t try to find order. Try to find your internal meaning because reality may change and you have to be ready for it.
I got all of that from Zorba and much more. I purposefully didn’t finish it because I want to nakedly go back in to bathe in that feeling. To come out of the subway knowing my mind will breathe fresher air for having read it for 10 minutes.
Work is about learning a language. Anyone can teach themselves the various work languages; programming, business, science, art, etc. Developing the personal skills to learning them is more important than knowing the languages themselves. Losing a job is much easier to handle when you know you have the ability to learn another language as opposed to thinking you have to prepare yourself to figure out a whole new job.
I’ve seen too many curious and adaptable friends work endlessly at grueling, unfulfilling jobs when they already have the natural skills to do something else. Money, always the quoted scarce resource, is only as limiting as your desire for change. That desire – an ache for more- is powerful enough to influence how you handle your money to make it work for you (rather than you working for it). When you flip the desire switch, the movement to a new you progresses at blinding speed. Potential goes from being a word to becoming a realization.
As I sit here typing away on a computer in India, I think of all the alternate ways people are living right now. Just thinking of the endless traffic, I’m awestruck at the constant, continuous nature of everyday life all over the world.
As Robert Frost said, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
Rather than getting me down, it gives me the freedom to know that the life I’m living is one of an endless number of possibilities. All I have to do to change it is change my context.
Fort Minor’s “Right Now” describes this all too well. So does one of my favorite movies of all time, Run Lola Run.
Settling is the key word. Once we have X number of things we are set, we’ve made it. The status quo: a family, a house with a backyard, a dog, cars, TVs, possessions, wealth. Do you actually need these things or have you convinced yourself that you want them?
What don’t you need that you think you want?
There are people who do want the societal status quo (or portions of it). There are those who rebel against it because, well, they’re rebels and they need something to be against. There are those who want to provide others the opportunity to achieve the status quo. Those that want to build something new. Those that want to sleepwalk through it all. Those that want to be engaged fully in everything. Those that want to communicate. Love. Cherish. Hate. Heal. Discover. Run. Escape. Observe. Just be.
Commenting on Schaefer’s Blog today, I realized the dilemma that we face on a daily basis. Making inane choices that actually matter. In the aggregate.
MONEY
Currency is the most obvious. The cycle starts the moment we spend money. From our wallets to the cash register all the way up to the parent company as a credit. So whether it’s cigarettes or clothing or fast food, what you buy does make a difference. More personally, it expresses your support towards that business’ bottomline.
EFFORT
A more subtle example is the work we do. We don’t view work the same way as volunteering, even though work is even more of a demanding master. The tradeoff is MONEY. Our desire to be at work when we don’t want to be is directly tied to our bank account. Where we work also signifies allegiance to a greater cause. Engineering might be a calling, but it is also a tool. Apply it with discretion.
TIME
Often referred to as the most valuable currency, how we spend it tends to define us a little too much. On one hand, time utilized towards study or personal development is productive. On the other hand, it may be stressful. Playing video games or going out to party may be fun and relaxing. It may also be destructive to well-being. It’s VERY relative.
Understanding our individual relationship with each of the resources above can be extremely rewarding. The final – and possibly harshest – judge is you. The idea of “opportunity cost” is prevalent in our ROI-driven, American dreamy culture. But not so much in others. Judging what may be lost if we choose one thing over another may be useful for long-term planning, but will deplete one of the above in the short-term.
We all change our minds, so there’s little reason for regret. Choose as it suits you.
The quarter-life crisis and the mid-life crisis seem to result from two things; higher life expectancy and greater exposure to information on a global level.
We share more information faster
I’ll tackle the latter first. As in the case of psychological diagnoses, just by coining the term we’ve made a phenomenon out of it. What was meant to be a label defining a cohort’s struggle through hard times becomes a scapegoat for a variety of other problems. So no, I don’t think everyone really goes through it.
From what I’ve read, the DSM-IV vaguely defines the mid-life crisis as an adjustment disorder. Which makes me wonder about the standard by which adjustment is measured. What do we need adjusting to? Who defines that standard? And should we want to adjust? A word that better suits is “expectation”. Whether quarter or mid, we haven’t adjusted, or come to terms with what’s expected of us.
Misunderstandings, arguments, crises are usually 50/50. Never is one person completely at fault. There are two things at play here; a person’s ability to adjust and poor standards set for adjustment. If an increasing portion of the population is suffering from this crisis, maybe society needs to reexamine its expectations. But this doesn’t happen enough.
The person going through the crisis, initially outcasted and eventually adopted into the definition-driven community of struggling 20/40 somethings, is forced to sacrifice reconcile their expectations with those of society. This step is crucial – even character-defining – since the choice is buying in or not.
I know a lot of people who’ve gone through the quarter-life crisis, but I’m never clear about the outcome. I’m curious about people’s experience after the fact. I want to ask questions like “Did you settle and for what?”, “If you didn’t, what did you redefine in your life and how is different from society?”
We live longer so we know less younger
Life expectancy is the underlying theme. This is all new to us. Whereas society may be proliferating outdated standards, we as individuals may just not have a clue. We haven’t lived this long, ever. Everything changed post-industrial revolution and we’ve been making it up as we go along.
This is where I high-five the quarter-lifers and mid-lifers. Instead of being a diagnosis in the big book of mental disorders, this kind of a crisis builds new cultural memes, argues against status-quo through personal struggle, and acknowledges that change is necessary. It’s simply evolution taking it’s course. We used to be adults in our teens and now 30-year olds are going back home to live with their parents (who are alive and wealthy enough to support it).
Living through this crisis is all about uncertainty, which isn’t so bad on it’s own. What gets me riled up is the suffering that ensues from the uncertainty. That it’s a bad thing not to know even if we’re living longer and society hasn’t reevaluated it’s standards. That you drink through it, cheat through it, leave kids behind through it, spend excessively through it. That I’m not sure I understand. My guess is that transitions are harder to deal with than we expect, because we don’t talk about transitions enough.
It’s a set up
The keyword is “expectations”. That we need them at all. Outside of a cliched sense of “no expectation, moment-to-moment living”, there is a lot of truth in not setting yourself up for failure or letting someone else set you up in the first place. It’s unavoidable in the case of your parents, friends or the media. You need to know the definition in order to redefine it. Recognize though that it is not a bad experience, not a crisis. It just is.
On decisions? On life? On relationships? On career? By waffling, I mean those times when deep down inside you know what you want to do, but are passively waiting around for “things” to happen to help you along. It can’t be helped; we all do this from time to time, especially on the big, hard stuff. Reducing the time you waffle on something can only get you where you want to go sooner.
So how do you do it?
Think about someone putting a gun to your head and asking, “If you had to make a decision right now, what would you do?” There’s no life or death choice, it’s about the stark fear of facing your end and getting your juices flowing, mind and body together deciding what’s best. Like this:
In the midst of a quarter-life crisis, sticking to a job that doesn’t quite suit you, wanting to pursue something but you don’t know what…this scenario may sound familiar. So you waffle for days, weeks, months, even years, before making a move and realize how many days, weeks, months and years you could have saved if you had just moved when you thought of it. So why didn’t you?
I’m not discounting the fear of change. It’s scary. Comfort is touted as the goal and hey, when you’re comfortable, why bother? You’re getting by, you’re making do. And you do this till you can’t stand it and then move. Or you do this because you’ve blown up the fear of change so much in your head that it’s beyond reality. The earth will collapse if you _______ scenarios that don’t make sense but are emotionally charged to the point of debilitating your instinctual, gut-driven desire to move.
All the planning and preparation fizzle when you’re in the moment of making the decision you so long waffled away from. So don’t plan or prepare, but do! Careful, this can have remarkable, adrenaline-pumping effects that can be addictive and keep you emotionally charged to the point of constant exhilaration. Not knowing is the cure. Leave the comfort to someone else.
I’ve found myself drifting in and out of conversation lately. Kinda like JD does frequently in Scrubs:
It’s very natural; an unforced shifting towards a memory that I flash back to without thinking. And that’s the key, “without thinking”. I’m not thinking about forcing myself to concentrate on the conversation. There’s no disrespect to the person I’m having a conversation with either. In fact, I’m following the gist of it very well and if I were to force myself to maintain eye contact or keep listening attentively to portions that don’t add to the gist, the split second it takes to think about paying attention would take away from me listening and I would have to recover anyway. This may sound ludicrously detailed, but when you’re the person talking, you notice that split second when the other person’s eyes blink a little differently. Maybe it’s the pupils, but there’s a change and you notice it! There’s no hiding a break in flow.
There’s a rhythmic cadence to conversation and it changes from person to person. I feel I lose the rhythm less now because I’m drifting as opposed to when I’m forcing myself not to drift. In fact, I believe most of us are terrible listeners because of the latter. Would the world be full of lost daydreamers and drifters if we all flowed in and out of the ebbs in rhythm? I don’t think so. We might be that much more efficient/effective at conversing.
This is most apparent at the end of meetings or in the middle of a class lecture. In either setting, by that time we all have a clue of what’s going on and start looking out the window, at the clock, people watching, tapping our feet, feeling restless and so on. Again, I don’t view this as disrespectful behavior, but rather as cues that the one-way conversation a lecturer or meeting head is having is becoming redundant, losing value, or going through a natural ebb. If these cues were acknowledged appropriately, maybe the person talking would shift gears or end the meeting/lecture, or start involving the people present. Instead, authority is often used as a mechanism to force value, not to create value.
The just be and you are mentality jives well with this for obvious reasons. Forcing ourselves to be something we’re not only creates false impressions of what we care about. When talking or listening, we don’t have to be conscious of drifting because it happens very naturally, but make ourselves think about it because we feel like it’s disrespectful. In the context of social norms, it may in fact be, but is that logical? If both parties recognized the quality or casualness or the silence within conversation fully, disrespect would play no part. We would simply be.
It’s called “Twitching” and you get why at the end. I won’t repost the text directly because there’s something about reading it on the Gym Jones site. I don’t know how to think about it in any other state of mind than my own. You read and experience it in your own shoes. Suffice it to say, it will shake you, maybe make you grit your teeth and actually twitch in angst. Here are some quotes:
With each drag of the razor you ask yourself why you piss your blood into another man’s cup. Working at the job he offered, your future is between his thumb and forefinger. And the necessary accessories, the proclamations of success you thought gave you stability provide your boss security. Your debt encourages acquiescence, the heavy mortgage makes you polite.
On Monday you eat frozen food and live the homogenized city experience. But Sunday you thought about cutting your hair very short…
…Tuesday you look at the face in the mirror again. It stares back, accusing.
I love the next one. The experiencing – going through an emotion, an action, a passion, a charge – is the grit-making stuff that makes you who you are, not the experience itself. Life is the big experience. What you bring to it is up to you. Your self remembers what it felt like to go through that experience and the fact that you toughed it out in your own way is what others see. You just can’t hide it. Confidence isn’t complexity, it’s the simplicity of your layers stripped down to the core leaving you naked and true.
Don’t react to the itch with a scratch. Instead, learn it. Honor the necessity of both the itch and the scratch. But a haircut and a new soundtrack do not a modern man make. As long as you have a safety net you act without commitment. You’ll go back to your old habits once you meet a little resistance. You need the samurai’s desperateness and his insanity.
The DailyOm below deserves its own post because every sentence is so well-crafted and echoes the message of this blog extremely well. The essence is to work from the core, continuously learning about yourself, your behaviors, your reactions to figure out what you want. Once you do, the law of attraction takes over and your environment centers around that guiding force you’ve created. The energy you’re pushing out to the world. I’ll let the post say the rest. If you’re a fan of the DailyOMs, check out the DailyOM Inspirations I’ve accumulated over the past few years.
August 20, 2008 Being Clear About Desires
Getting What We Want
The best way to get what we want from life is to first know what we want. If we haven’t taken the time to really understand and identify what would truly make us happy, we won’t be able to ask for it from those around us or from the universe. We may not even be able to recognize it once it arrives. Once we are clear about what we want, we can communicate it to those around us. When we can be honest about who we are and what we want, there is no need to demand, be rude or aggressive, or manipulate others that are involved in helping us get what we want. Instead, we know that we are transmitting a signal on the right frequency to bring all that we desire into our experience.
As the world evolves, humanity is learning to work from the heart. We may have been taught that the way to get what we want is to follow certain rules, play particular games, or even engage in acts that use less than our highest integrity. The only rules we need to apply are those of intention and connection. In terms of energy, we can see that it takes a lot of energy to keep up a false front or act in a way that is counter to our true nature, but much less energy is expended when we can just be and enjoy connections that energize us in return. Then our energy can be directed toward living the life we want right now.
Society has certain expectations of behavior and the roles each of us should play, but as spiritual beings we are not bound by these superficial structures unless we choose to accept them. Instead, we can listen to our hearts and follow what we know to be true and meaningful for us. In doing so, we will find others who have chosen the same path. It can be easy to get caught up in following goals that appear to be what we want, but when we pursue the underlying value, we are certain to stay on our right path and continue to feed our soul.
The DailyOm below deserves its own post because every sentence is so well-crafted and echoes the message of this blog extremely well. The essence is to work from the core, continuously learning about yourself, your behaviors, your reactions to figure out what you want. Once you do, the law of attraction takes over and your environment centers around that guiding force you’ve created. The energy you’re pushing out to the world. I’ll let the post say the rest. If you’re a fan of the DailyOMs, check out the