"O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible."
How will you exhaust the limits of the possible...and perhaps as a result, not become immortal, but leave a legacy?
Or
Write about something you felt, or thought about, during class today.
Nice job today, keep up the good work.
10 comments:
For this entry, I suppose I shall answer both of the questions, because I think that personally they are both linked. As I said in my legacy assignment, I do not believe in leaving a legacy that is for the glory of changing the world, but for the change itself. There needs to be a motive for action though. I would only do something like this if it was for me. For example, I am angry at all of the people in the world who are hypocritical and immoral by my standards, therefore I will leave a legacy that will change their viewpoints and make theirs more like mine. Why? Because I just really hate stupid people and in order for me to be happy, I would want them to change that about themselves and stop doing things I don't like. There are a lot of viewpoints in this society that do not fit in with modern society, and so in order to make society a better place for me, I would change those things which I dislike. It is very selfish, but at the same time it is not for the purpose of becoming immortal or leaving behind a memory, or tying a specific purpose to my life.
So without a specific purpose attached to my life, how do I find a "point" or a "reason" to live?
The above is just something I'd like to do because I am generally a very selfish and angry person, and I don't like it when I don't get what I want. There has to be something keeping me alive besides some "legacy" which I wouldn't even call a legacy necessarily.
I thought for a while, and the one thing in this world that I truly know (believe is a bad word because in my mind it implies doubt) is that one day everyone is going to die. That is a fact. I do not find this depressing at all. This is my greatest truth (there are two, but the other one comes later maybe…) but still if that is true, then why not end my life now and fulfill the inevitable? Because I "believe" that even if life doesn't have a purpose, its still there, and I might as well take every opportunity to enjoy everything I've got. The fear was a little bit harder, since most people fear death and I just don't. At first I thought that my greatest fear was pain, but then I realized that this wasn't so true because you don't have time to fear it unless you see it coming and that rarely happens. Usually you have time to get out of the way when you see the car coming, the pain of getting hit by it happens unexpectedly. My real fear, is the possibility of not being able to do the things I really want to do, not by someone else's fault but by my own. My own actions preventing me from getting what I want.
Hypothetical Example:
Say I was one of those kids who pirated $10,000 worth of music, and I was just about to turn 18, and getting ready to go to my top choice college, and then one day I get home from school and there is a letter from the RIAA waiting for me telling me I am about to be sued for more I am worth. I would probably lose all the money I would have spent on college, who would probably revoke my acceptance. Not only that but I would get kicked out of school because stealing music is illegal and the school probably wouldn't be to happy about that, so I wouldn't graduate from high school. I wouldn't be able to get a job because I would be a criminal, and I would probably be in jail anyway or doing community service forever. Basically I'd either be in jail, on the street, or in my parents basement. It would be my fault because I had knowledge that this was illegal, but I still would have made the decision to do it. In this case, it would have been something that I had done myself that would prevent me from ultimately getting what I want, which is why I don't Pirate data. (ninjas are better than pirates anyway)
This type of situation is my greatest fear, which just proves how selfish I am. My legacy is to get what I want, my belief is that I should do whatever I want because I'm going to die anyway, and my fear is that I'm not going to get what I want. At least I have the guts to admit it.
What I’m going to say is probably predictable. At first, I almost refused to write about I’m about to write, because I always like the idea of having something unexpected to say. But I guess predictability is pretty unavoidable in this case, and I’d rather say something true than something out of the ordinary. So what do I want to leave behind? I want to write a book.
I know a lot of people say this. I’ve been listening to my mom say she was going to write a book since I was about six years old. A book of your own is an alluring idea. It’s an accomplishment you can hold. It’s heavy and full of thought and has your name embossed in shiny letters on the cover. When you open the book to the author’s page at the back, your face smiles back at someone you don’t know and says “Yes. I wrote this.” It’s something about pride and something about completion. I could never deny that none of that is appealing to me. But I fervently hope that, if I ever do write a book, it will be more to me than a small check from some obscure publishing house every once. I want to write a book that tells a truth.
I don’t want to write this book now. This isn’t just because I’m lazy, or because I’m so busy doing what I have to do that I can’t be doing what I should do. It’s because, no matter how valiant an effort I give, I know that I’m not mature enough right now to remove my own personal bullshit from my work. No matter how I try, I can’t see past it yet. If I wrote this book now, the kind of truth I want to write would be too easily influenced and crowded by a naiveté I haven’t shed.
So I see myself as a gray old lady sitting down with a pencil in my hand sixty years from now and writing down an idea I have been developing for decades. I want it to be something I would never think of now, a truth about this world that takes a lifetime to figure out. I want to change my mind about it thousands of times before I ever write one word. I need perspective and time and maybe even a bit of senility to see the story that is right before my eyes, and I don’t want to write it until I understand it.
With this timeline in mind, my biggest fear creeps its way on in. What I fear above everything else is regrets. I’m terribly afraid of looking back and realizing I could have gotten everything I wanted if I just hadn’t stopped trying. In my predictability and my certainty, I knew the answer to this question instantly, and I’m afraid of dying twenty years or five months or one day before I’m ready to write what I need to write. I don’t know how to fix this problem, and it leaves me with a nagging, persistent tension I can’t stand or change. So I guess all I can do is keep figuring things out and hope I’m lucky enough to learn something true and have the time to write it down.
Today we were asked to think about what we fear most. When I first began to think about this, the common aspects of society which all fear came to mind: judgment, failure, and the alike. These are all just a part of life. Then I began to think about moments when I have been really upset and what has triggered that emotion. I thought of a variety of instances such as being bummed when I messed up in hockey, thinking I was a horrible friend when my friends were upset and I didn't know what to do to help them, not getting good grades and seeing the disappointment on my parents faces when they knew I could do better and so did I. After attempting to analyze these assorted events, I concluded that my real fear is that of disappointment. Disappointing myself and further disappointing those around me.
I wouldn't necessarily call it failure, granted in each point in my life I reflected upon I was failing at something, but it hurts me more to know I was letting others down and also in the mean time, not reaching my full potential. I think I originally thought about this idea when I read: "exhaust the limits of the possible". I don't want to be another person that gets in the passenger seat just for the ride and settles for what the driver has in store for them. I want to be the driver shaping my journey and go as far as I can before my gas runs out no matter what obstacles are in front of me keep going on.
All of my fears and my beliefs either overlap or contradict each other. I fear failure, yet I believe that failure is almost always the key to success. I fear the unknown, yet I believe that pursuing the unknown builds growth and character. In a way I suppose my fears may only be fake, may only be temporary feelings of anxiousness or delusion. If my failures will lead me to success then why should failure be fearful? It seems that fear doesn’t needs to exist at all. It is only fear that keeps us from living fully in a process that inevitably ends in death. It is fear that holds us back. I wish that I could wake up tomorrow and be completely free of all of the fears I have ever known, but it is not that simple. I don’t think that this will happen until I am completely content in my self-trust. I am the only one who controls me, therefore if I can trust myself immeasurably; fear would not be necessary; I could face things that were once fearful and accept the result of doing so based on the knowledge that I have control. This information however seems useless to me at this time in my life. I feel like gradually this process of letting go of my fears will just come together as my knowledge (of anything, of myself) grows and time goes on. I am not seeking to overcome these fears tomorrow because I know that this is impossible. As with the idea of a legacy, I believe that most people live their lives in a way that is either meant to satisfy others or themselves. In either case, I don’t think that people take what will be left of them when they are gone into consideration when making decisions in everyday life. I believe that everyone leaves some kind of unknown legacy, but that that legacy is not always recognized. So many great painters went unrecognized throughout their lives, only to become famous because of their legacy. Therefore if I live true to myself, without letting fear hold me back from those truths, I shall in some way leave a legacy, whether it be noticed or not.
Today I mentioned how the one thing I can surely believe in is change, because it is inevitable that many things- if not everything- in your life will at some point in time change. These changes can come in many different forms, from trivial changes (like hair color) to the monumental change we will soon face when we accept out diplomas and resign our duties as a Berwick student. And while we’re supposed to find relief in the things we believe in, I’ve also discovered that change is something I fear tremendously. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I cried for two hours on the last day of sixth grade, all based on the fact that I liked things the way they were, and didn’t want it to change. A few years later, before I graduated from Middle School, I told myself that there was no way I’d be able to make the transition into high school- I remember sitting in my room and thinking “I don’t know how I’m going to do it,” a thought that seems more than a bit melodramatic to me now. I made it through graduation, and now that portion of my life seems so insignificant. It’s ironic, because I’ve often found that the result of certain changes have lead to greater things in my life, but I just can’t seem to learn through experience. Even though I know better things may come out of it, I find it safer and more comforting to keep things the way they are rather than to change everything.
Having reasoned that the one thing I believe in is also something I fear, it only seems fit to say that we can believe in fear. Humans are built to be fearful, it’s worked into their brains. It is created by one’s conscience, by establishing its own set of “rights” and “wrongs.” Often, I find that fear is created by a conflicting conscience- your mind says something is right, but your gut argues that it’s wrong. This shows that fear isn’t limited to the mind, it transcends to the body as well. Signs like a faster heartbeat or cold sweat are intuitive and prove that fear is innately placed within all of us- it’s part of our own physical build up. Like the human body itself, fear is by no means a simple matter, and its complexity is another attribute that makes fear so reliable. It can come in an infinite array of shapes and sizes, from the amorphous to the most obvious concrete object, and this versatility makes it adaptable to all human beings.
Fear truly is inescapable, but I also believe that- despite all the inconveniences its caused for me- it’s gotten a reputation worse than it deserves. There are times when fear can become enriching, and serve as a catalyst into overcoming that fear and ultimately finding yourself in a better place. Fear can change, and adapt itself to the transformations you’ve made in your own life. But the ultimate sense of stability lies within the fact that fear will always be present, no matter how many evolutions its undergone, and the effect it has on your life is determined by how you choose to deal with it.
I don't really believe in anything.
I realized this today, lying down in the middle of Fogg field today. Well, I didn't really realize it today, I think i've known it for a while, but still, that's what I was thinking.
I mean, I do believe in all those basic truths of life...i think someone mentioned change and that we're all going to die. I can't sit here and say i don't believe in that shit because obviously its true.
But when i say i don't believe in anything, i mean that there is nothing, no true belief, that i would die for. Nothing that i would put myself on the line for. Why? This leads to my fear. I think the reason i don't believe in anything is because i'm afraid to. I think i'm afraid to put all of myself into a single belief. Investing your whole life into something, to become that vulnerable, the idea frightens me: to put everything you are into something makes it so much easier for everything you are to be destroyed. I don't think right now i'm ready for that kind of fragility. Emo for the win.
Today, during the fifteen minutes of personal reflection, I thought a lot about the legacy paper that I wrote just a few days ago. I invested a lot of time and thought into what I hope people would say about me if I weren’t here any longer. It helped me examine the relationships that have added a lot of personality and value to my life. After the 708 words of reflection, I realized that I only hope that when people think about me, they simply feel happy.
With any hope comes fear, whether it is fear of failure or fear of disappointing those who support you in your endeavors. Fear crept into my peaceful contemplation today. I started thinking about how scared I am that people aren’t going to remember me for all of the positive energy that I shared, but only remember me for my moments of weakness. I tend to hold back sometimes, for fear that people will judge me too irrationally or that my insecurities will reveal themselves. My fear comes from knowing that I cannot always hide my flaws and that the people who encourage me could lose respect and confidence in my abilities as a person, daughter, and friend. I want to be a lot of things and I want my existence to matter to people. However, these hopes are meaningless if I let my fear transcend my goals. It is important for me to begin to understand that it is only natural and healthy to have flaws, that is what makes all of the positive traits so valuable.
I walked out on the field today during class and just thought about myself and my major strengths and weaknesses as a person. I contemplated my beliefs and my fears. I actually came up with some really good stuff. Maybe it isn't good that I'm going to look at my weaknesses in this entry.
Before I do that though, I believe that life is about the connections that one makes with surroundings and other people. I used to believe that the purpose of life was to love, but I do not really understand love anymore, I do not even know if it exists. But life is defined by connection, happiness comes from connection. Isolation leads one to think only about the negative elements of the world. The positive pieces of the world lie within the things and people that inhabit it.
After a lot of thought and some help from Nietzsche over the past few weeks I have discovered my biggest weakness and fear in life. My greatest fear is the worry of how others perceive me. I have a very strong set of personal morals, standards, and beliefs. I am a really genuinely positive person who hates to treat anyone badly. I feel that a lot of who I am gets lost in translation. Obviously my friends are the people that know me best, but I wish that everyone that surrounded me understood who I am and what I stand for. Yes, I make mistakes, but so does everyone else. Sometimes I feel like I am held to a higher standard by a lot of people because I am up on stage every morning. People look at me and get the idea that I am completely full of myself and arrogant. I just wish that I could open up to everyone and show them that the person that they see up on stage is just a job of mine. I am not better than anyone, if anything I am lower than a lot of people. As for right now, I am just trying to give everyone that surrounds me the respect that they deserve. I do not really know how to overcome this fear.
I am comfortable with myself. Today in Humanities we wrote about Nietzsche's idea of the eternal reoccurance. If I was to live today over an infinite amount of times would I be satisfied with the person that I am and the kind of life that I am living. The answer to that question would undoubtedly be yes. I am happy with myself and for where I am on my path of life I believe that I have my life figured out well enough. My morals and my beliefs are exactly how I want them to be and I follow them well. My lifestyle has achieved this happy medium between very relaxed and overstimulated that I have been looking to achieve for years now.
After establishing the fact that I am happy with the person that I am. I will say that I do not know what the solution is to my greatest fear. Obviously people are going to get the wrong impression of my personality for the rest of my life, but I just wish there was something I could do about it. There are elements within all people that I can relate to and get along with. It would be cliche to say that everyone has something in common and can get along with eachother, but I do genuinely believe that. I know it is not exactly possible, but I believe that it theoretically happen. That is the world I hope to one day live in now. For now I am just working to overcome this weakness of mine.
While I was lying on the grass today, trying to think of what I believe in, or what I feared, I was having some difficulty really capturing them. In regards to what I believe in, in typical Erika Gottlob fashion, I was just going to accept that I couldn’t think of anything. Instead of just doing that I decided that the only thing I can say I have complete belief in is that I don’t know. An uncertainty about something in my life is always a constant, and I know that to be completely true. This uncertainty isn’t necessarily a product of indecision though, because even if I’m sure of everything I do, the future is still nothing I know in this moment. We are all uncertain at some points, or many points in our lives, but life is a search for smaller tangibles we use to comfort us in the greater pool of uncertainty.
My idea of a legacy brings rise to one of the fears I thought of today, and that’s a fear of not being able to, or just not following through with my beliefs and thoughts. For whatever reason, I so many have ideas in my head that are never shown to the world, which is disservice to myself, because I will never be remembered for the thoughts that remain stagnant in my head, and never get displayed for the world. Part of this fear is somewhat Dostoyevsky-esque in that it’s a failure to communicate with society. I understand what I think and why I want to be, or do something, but the outside world doesn’t. This miscommunication and failure happens to me everyday, even with the simplest things, like today in class when I couldn’t explain myself even though there was a conscious thought in my head that made sense to me. At least two other times I thought about raising my hand, or raised my hand for a second then took it back because I knew I wouldn’t be able to convey what I wanted to. I do this all the time with the written and spoken words, so my “intellectual thought” either turns in to a blubbering mess of stumbling and pauses and words I try to take back, or a bunch of letters that look like a foreign language. This pisses me off so much, and continually frustrates me because I don’t know how to fix it, but I know it disables me. I’m afraid of my failure to communicate with society, possibly because I haven’t found this “universal language,” because what I attempt to convey is often misunderstood. This is the language I will need to speak in order to form a legacy, because within universality is immortality (or maybe it’s the other way around?).
I think there’s something missing in the relationship between my brain, and my pen or my mouth. There has to be some connector that just isn’t there, because in between the time I think it, and when I speak or write it, the message gets jumbled and spewed out awkwardly. It reminds me of those scary dreams you have when you try to scream but cannot say anything. I feel like something I say is just like white noise, and something I write is just a bunch of words, because in the end the message is not successfully conveyed, and it’s like a dream where I can’t scream, and those dreams scare the hell out of me.
I actually didn’t think of this in class, but I’m still going to write about it because it eventually came to my mind and, and that’s the fear of growing up. Before doing this I put headphones on, listened to that song “Graduation,” and pictured graduating for a few minutes. It’s really embarrassing, but I actually started to cry, so I suppose you could say I let this fear overtake me. I’m not afraid of the act of graduation itself, it’s just what it represents. It’s the symbolic closing of the door to my childhood, the door that remains ajar for only a little more than a month. The fear of growing up seems simple, and almost pointless and stupid, but my fear of it represents a lot more. When I finally have to grow up, this is when I see that I need to start on my path towards a legacy, and take the reigns in my life. At this point I will have enough information to function independently in society, and I have adult responsibilities, expectations and consequences. I will be responsible for myself, to take care and support myself, which is ultimate control and power, and that scares me. In childhood, I’ve always had a force propelling me forward on my path. That stops when the door closes, and I’m afraid my own legs won’t take that step forward, and I will remain stagnant, or keep trying to unlock the door after turning back.
I can really identify with what you said about how we’ve all been spoon fed too much and always try to have someone else find the answers for us. Being a “child” is just a mask to put on and hide that people are living for you sometimes, and you are being spoon fed and pampered with no responsibility to find your own answers. Even though I’m older, I will be starting new, with a blank slate that needs to be all my own. The end of childhood represents a symbolic death, the shedding of the protective skin and the rebirth of something raw and newly exposed to the world. As an adult in this new skin, there will be wounds, and bruises, but those will go away and become less frequent with time. I’m afraid that before I come to the stage of resignation and acceptance that brings thicker skin, I will succumb to the wounds I was protected from as a child. I imagine that I will continually question whether I’m strong enough to conquer this adult world, and all too often that answer will be no. But, I am also afraid of it being yes, because then I wonder what to do after.
I’m struggling right now with where to go from here. The worst part about all this, is that it’s not even the worst part, because that’s when I actually have to do something about these fears. I’m entering one of the most difficult periods of my life where consciousness and action prevail only in their opposition to one another. My future legacy that is “woven into the lives of others,” will not be obtained by me just typing all this on a computer, so even if I could say something that sounded incredibly profound, it is only “engraved in stone” and means nothing right now.
(Quick note - I wrote this much earlier today, and my feelings have completely shifted since that moment in time. However, I don't have the time to write another entry right now, so I'll go with what I have.)
When we walked outside today, I did not meander as most did while they were lost in their thoughts. I walked with purpose and intention, with no specific goal beyond the desire of escaping, of distancing myself as much as possible from our class and from the school.
So I walked. I walked past the baseball and softball fields, past the upper fields, and then onto a small path across from it that I had never gone on before. Exteriorly I appeared calm, but my inner thoughts were in turmoil. Our conversation in class and my copious fears about the present and future were searing me to the point where I literally felt nauseous.
The subject of suicide is never a light topic of conversation, but it is a particularly hard one to have at Berwick, given recent history. I thought I was a mature enough student to approach Camus’ pieces with a professional sense of educational detachment, devoid of my personal history or feelings on the matter.
For a while I felt that I was succeeding. Yet today, when Camus compared suicide to “a great work of art,” my carefully crafted inner emotional filing cabinet burst open, feelings and memories that I had done my very best to suppress scattering within my mind. Rehashing them through writing is quite difficult, and I currently possess neither the tenacity nor the audacity to record them all. Yet the pain, guilt, doubt, and confusion that filled me were immense.
All of these emotions consumed me during my walk, along with my general fears -- doubts about myself and the course of my life that often plague me (and other people I’m sure) at this critical point in my coming of age. On my newly discovered path, I was quite surprised to find that there is an entire body of water back behind the sports fields. I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable about Berwick, so it was slightly astonished to unearth this new aspect of our school that had been previously unknown to me. The pond is not incredibly large, but it is a good size. Its blue waters rippled calmly as the breeze blew past me.
In the middle of the pond was a patch of land, with a blue heron standing rigidly beside it. I stared at it for a good five minutes, and I didn’t catch it moving once the whole time. The heron appeared so at one with his environment, so at peace with his surroundings.
I wanted to spend the rest of my morning observing that heron, in the hopes that I could possibly absorb some of that strength it possessed. Yet my fear of people's perceptions eventually drove me back to the Library. What would people think of me if I just bailed on school for the rest of the day? What would I tell my teachers -- that I'd had a tough moment so I ran off and hid in the woods?
Throughout the rest of the day, I started feeling better. I was able to suppress the pain and doubt underneath my usually cheerful appearance. I don't quite know what the point of my walk was today, or this blog entry for that matter. I guess what it is that I wish I had better control over feelings. I'm such an emotional basket case sometimes, and it's usually over stuff that's so petty and insignificant. Everything I read or experience has this deeply visceral effect on me, which is extremely frustrating and even sometimes inhibiting to growth and learning. I wish there was a switch I could turn to desensitize myself, but there is none. All I can do is hope that someday I'll be more capable of exercising some control over my sentiments.
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