“Love and Be Loved.”
As a refresher from my blog post of nearly 3 months ago, this was my closing lesson. Grimm, Roman mythology (not Greek – I studied Latin in school), Hans Christian Anderson, among others, taught me that the best tales told deliver a punch line to the figurative gut as a lesson or moral implication. I strive to make these heroes of mine proud.
And let’s be honest – I am always learning. As much as I would like to think that I know everything, I am constantly reminded that the world is not simple enough for my simple brain to understand in its entirety. Isn’t that beautiful and frightening all at once?
I picked up Leonard Cohen’s book of poetry called book of longing in the CDMX airport (Mexico City) over this past weekend. For a man who lived so much life, I looked to him for guidance. And Mr. Cohen made me laugh out loud with his interpretation of “imposter syndrome”:
One of My Letters
I corresponded with a famous rabbi,
But my teacher caught sight of one of my letters
And silenced me.
“Dear Rabbi,” I wrote him for the last time,
“I do not have the authority or understanding
To speak of these matters.
I was just showing off.
Please forgive me.
Your Jewish brother,
Jikan Eliezer.”
Likewise, I find it comforting and fascinating that other people in this world are looking inward, searching their soul for the answers that I find myself asking my own soul on the regular. Then I find it frightening that millions of years of humans are still searching for these answers. If someone has found them, they certainly aren’t publishing it on Reddit, Twitter, or other public forums. Sadly, perhaps they are, as of yet, untranslated hieroglyphs in ancient ruins. In the past week, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain committed suicide while the CDC was publishing its latest results on the over 25% increase in deaths from suicide in the past few years. Are we getting further from the truth? Are we seeking self-indulgences and vanity through, ahem, blogging, selfies, and tweets instead of what really matters? And, what does really matter?
Excerpt from Through the Painted Deserts by Donald Miller (author of Blue Like Jazz):
My life, this gift I have been given, has been wasted, thus far, attempting to answer meaningless questions. Recently I have come to believe there are more important questions than HOW questions: how do I get money, how do I get laid, how do I become happy, how do I have fun? On one of our trips to central Texas, I stood at the top of a desert hill and looked into the endlessness of the heavens, deep into the inky blackness of the cosmos, those billion stars seeming to fall through the void from nowhere to nowhere. I stood there for twenty minutes, and as it had a few times that year, my mind fell across the question of WHY? … and so in exchanging the HOW questions for the WHY questions I began to probe the validity of presuppositions. … I confess I wanted to believe life was bigger, larger than my presuppositions.
I often think about the time I could be spending to make this world a better place, or at least make one person feel like the world is a better place, if I weren’t spending all of this time in my own head. Searching out meanings to questions. Analyzing interactions and human behavior. Watching life lived and people fall in love instead of living and loving myself. It feels safer to be a voyeur. It takes less energy to sit on the sidelines of passivity and by approximation revel in the love and life of those around you. And by you, I mean me.
But I can’t help but wonder – are you feeling this way too? Clearly Leonard Cohen, Donald Miller, and I have had these thoughts, so it wouldn’t be out of line to think you may as well.
Let’s do this together then. What scares you the most? What keeps you benched instead of out there with the rest of the team?
My fears, in a kind of random chaos:
- REJECTION: what if I am an asshole and my friends, family, and society as a whole deem me to be too weird to be a part of it all?
- Ignorance: what don’t I know and how does that limit my perspective?
- Buried alive – no reason to explain this one. It is fucking frightening. I refuse to read or watch anything that has such a lewd plotline.
- Complacency: see #2. I never want to be boring.
- Changing too much: see #4 and then follow to #1.
- Camo dying. It is inevitable but I am scared of life without him all the same.
- I am no longer scared of unemployment though. I weathered that storm mostly well. Just a few more grey hairs, a little more debt, and an interesting knowledge of employment law.
- Imposter syndrome: am I actually good at anything? I am a millennial so I typically expect that everything I attempt may land me with my own reality TV show. This leads me to trying my hand at almost everything. Modern 49er.
- Living my life on the foundation of FEAR.
Is the first step admitting you have a problem? If so, we are on the right track. Second step – learn from others, escape, meditate, practice loving yourself. Read Maya Angelou.
Touched by an Angel (Maya Angelou)
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.
