A Game of Chess Between Your Toes and Your Tears.
At the risk of sounding conceited, or perhaps even self-acquitting, I have been wondering around the idea that our hostility towards ourselves and the world around us might, in fact, be the very same thing that is essential for carrying ourselves in a way that has us setting examples worthy of following. I am exceptionally tired today, incapable of cooking the day's final meal. I have been waking up at 5am and running with the dogs, eating breakfast, then going to the gym. That is my morning. My afternoon consists of eating again, taking a nap, walking the dogs again, and by that time I'm a few hours shy of slumber. It is in these last few hours that I have been meaning to write something, but I am often too hungry or entirely uninspired. There is a stillness to the mornings that I regret not spending more time with, and there is a sense of solidarity and self-care that comes with falling asleep not long after nine pm.
Most people I speak with are at odds with themselves or the world around them. There are those who are perfectly conscious of it, and can verbalise it. There are those who are conscious of it, but can't locate where it comes from. And finally, there are those who are entirely unconscious of it. The latter, I avoid at all costs. They are problems. The second type tends to throw their stones at the outside world, and the former have a great deal to offer us if we listen, and if they are willing to share.
I see us as very compartmentalised. We experience ourselves as almost schizophrenic personalities stuffed haphardly inside a bag of skin. These personalities seldom meet one another. I believe that most, if not all, people who wander the earth defaulting to the idea that they are deserving of respect from others must carry with them a feeling of unease. I believe that it the same lack of consciousness that keeps them from questioning themselves is the same lack of consciousness that keeps the feeling of unease as a blurry whirring they carry with them. Something that might speak up once in a while when it needs to be heard. A display, that once carried out, will be apologised for and leave the individual feeling uneasy. That moment when one becomes a stranger to themselves, if only a moment. Or at least that is how it seems, that is easier to swallow. For the most part, the human being is divided, and it is the role they choose to live out in society that allows them to function this way. By obeying this role one can use the tools at their disposal to keep the fragments of themselves from making too much noise, for the most part.
Life offers plenty of opportunities for these fragments of ourselves to come to the surface, but we have an equal amount of opportunity to ignore them. So we do. The world is now fully shaped to do this. It is promoted like nothing else. The world is killing the individual so much so that it is often seen as an uneasy thing to be in the company of one.
To be honest, I care very little for the avoidant, and perhaps I care even less for those who blindly throw stones without facing themselves. The only true difference is the level of enjoyment one experiences. Of course, there are exceptions to this; I am not writing globally. I am writing at my peers. But, largely, after a while, most people grow to suffer at their own doing. We can discuss the original decisions that may have been made for us; the hand we are dealt. It is foolish to disregard it, but for anyone who can become conscious of the events that have transpired before now and how they have made an impact, the suffering that comes moving forward is of our own doing.
As I mentioned already, I am extremely tired, but I want to say something in regards to how I began. I do personally experience a lot of hostility towards the outside world and myself. I have spent the last year very conscious of my past feeling far too close to me. There are moments in it that I cherish, but nothing of myself that I care to revisit. I was, for the most part, self-serving and driven by impulse. Most of those impulses were the desire to avoid feeling certain things. I was a coward at best. And I feel this is a big problem... People really struggle admitting how cowardly they are. Looking around, from what I can make sense of, a vast majority of people have constructed the vast majority of their lives around avoidance. And what makes it worse, is these avoidant activities are celebrated. Honored as if they are acheivements.
I have come to understand that my hostility is aimed at three places: A lack of respect for the world around an individual, the celebration of avoidance, and the automatic assumption that one deserves respect. It didn't take me too long to realise that my hostility is aimed at my past self. So perhaps this is all very biased, as personal writing has to be, but from what I can tell, these are three very ugly and destructive character traits. They bring upon suffering and they escape responsibility. So, to finish things off, the hostility I feel is a reference point for how I should behave and what I should and should not tolerate from others. These fragments of myself that I grew to despise showed their other side and they began to work for the better of me, and especially the world around me. Or perhaps I work for them?
All I wanted to drop by and say is... The next time you find yourself feeling hostile towards yourself or the world around you, make yourself as still as possible. Do not reach for any avoidance. Let it seep in. Let it burn. Sit with it for as long as it needs. Let it disfigure you and dampen your eyes. Let it tell you what it came to tell you. I'm fairly sure that it will not be the berating you have been trying to avoid or transfer, but the lesson you need to move forward. The negative is just the other side of the positive, but you must be holding on to the coin before you can flip it. And remember, those who are capable of hurting others are yet to sit with the fragment of themselves that deserves their utmost disdain. Eventually, I believe we are all forced to do this, and we best hope it is not during the final sit down with ourselves.
Bon nuit.
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