Tag: courage

Unknown love

How many people these days are falling in love with people they’ve never met? Never even had a single two-way interaction with?

I have a proclivity for falling in love with people (and one may argue also objects and ideas) that are incapable of loving me back. So whether or not I fall in love with people I’ve never met is not a particularly useful gauge of anything. But technology has created a very robust category of one-way parasocial relationships, that can come in many flavours. Romantic love is surely one of them.

I wonder how many people, today, are hoping for something impossible. And how many are, secretly, perhaps even to themselves, glad of the impossible. And how many are wondering if, maybe, just maybe, the impossible is possible after all.

Because sometimes it is. But you can only be known if you let yourself be known. And, sometimes, for that, you must make yourself known.

One way relationships are safer than the alternative. I have fun hiding in them all the time. My brain has been delighted by all the excellent people it can watch on a screen from the shadows. But I don’t want that to be the peak of my experience. I don’t want the best relationships I’ve ever had to be with people who didn’t even need to know about them. I want more. And for that, I need to let the impossible be possible. I need to show myself to someone capable of seeing.

Of course, what comprises that capability has always been the conundrum. But my part in it, at least, I have some say in.

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Polaris

There’s a man walking around out there in the world who is, to some extent, responsible for all the good things that I am today, who I don’t know, who doesn’t know me, who doesn’t want to know me, and who never really even did anything to deserve the dubious honour of being my greatest teacher and guide.

This is the premise of the post that, when I didn’t write it, made my every other post optional.

My favourite author is Haruki Murakami. One of the things that is notable about Murakami’s stories is that the protagonists are not crazy, but when crazy things happen to them they just go with it. They don’t fight it. They don’t agonise over whether they’re going crazy. And they don’t create a load of drama around it either. They sort of acknowledge their unusual situation with an equanimous shrug, and that’s about the extent of it.

Murakami’s characters always kind of gave me hope that the fact that I was…not crazy, but, also, not quite not crazy either…wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

And then, when crazy things finally started happening to me, that hope probably predisposed me to go with them. Until the reality of the situation I had gone with started dawning on me. Because, actually, it does take a full-blown crazy person to go with it when crazy things start happening. So, upon realising that I was, in fact, a full-blown crazy person, I started thrashing. But it was too late; I had made my decision and gone past the point of no return.

The fine line between genius and insanity has long intrigued me. But, in my life, I have often been just courageous enough to find out how much of a coward I really am, and, instinctively, I feel like courage may in fact, at least in my case, be the line between genius and insanity. Because it takes a little bit of courage to pursue your crazy vision, but it takes a whole heart full of courage to hold true to that vision while simultaneously acknowledging the hostile reality surrounding it. And that’s when, if you choose to continue, it becomes devastatingly easy to buffer yourself with clever distortions. At which point you’re swimming in a choppy sea of half-truths and the shore you were heading for could be over there, or it could be over there, or it could be over there, or it could be over there.

This man, who I don’t know, who doesn’t know me, who doesn’t want to know me, for some reason, became my North Star. Not only did his existence tempt me into an ocean that looked cold and scary and objectively dangerous, with the promise of gold on the other side, but it guided me, from quadrillions of miles away, across that ocean. And the gold I found was not the gold I thought I’d find, because I hadn’t escaped the clever distortions, but it was fucking gold nonetheless.

For some reason that I have yet to comprehend, this man, who I don’t know, who doesn’t know me, who doesn’t want to know me, imbued me with the courage that I never thought I had when I looked at him. By orienting myself toward his light, I completed a years-long journey that I would have otherwise torn myself to shreds on after a couple of days. And, at this point, it’s safe to assume that ‘his light’ was illusory – just another clever distortion of my sea of half-truths – but The Light was really fucking there, because if it hadn’t been there, if it hadn’t been constant, if it hadn’t been the ever-fixéd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken, then I would have been lost.

This man, who I don’t know, who doesn’t know me, who doesn’t want to know me, allowed me to glimpse True Love. And I feel bad that he had to be the one to do that, because it wasn’t a job he signed up for and I don’t think it came without cost to him. I owe him a deep debt of gratitude. And at the same time, I have to acknowledge the fact that he didn’t have any fucking thing to do with it anyway. He was responsible for his own good grace in the face of my agonised thrashing, and for that there is a separate debt of gratitude. But the deep mystery of what transpired for me; the numinosity of those years of pilgrimage – that is a sacred burden that should never be placed on another human being’s shoulders.

You’ll have to forgive me if this blog post leaves you wondering what the hell this madwoman is rambling on about. This is a long thread to pull.

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Ideas lying dormant

I have all kinds of good ideas for things I could do to progress my life, improve myself, and create what I desire. It should be noted that they come from the extensive amount of time I spend studying and exploring such topics, rather than some innate wellspring of inspiration, but that’s beside the point.

I act on maybe a handful from every pile. Because most of them require more courage than I care to exert. They would require me to step far enough outside of expectations that I’d feel very exposed. And often I just don’t feel like I have the energy to process that additional discomfort. Because, from experience, it takes a lot of bandwidth. So I watch myself, in real-time, making sub-par but safe decisions. And I have a conversation with myself about how I should choose the braver option, and yes I know I should, but I’m not going to, no, I’m not going to, and that’s going to mean I still don’t step more fully into who I should be, and I know that, but I’m still not going to do it, I’m afraid not, but one day I’m going to have to do it, yes, and I could just choose to do it today, I could, but I won’t, no, oh well, oh well.

Virtuous qualities cannot be installed overnight. And courage is probably the weightiest of all virtues. I get that this is a long term investment. But I do wonder how much use it is observing this disparity. I know growth often comes in fits and spurts – long periods battling immoveable objects that suddenly dematerialise – and I guess that’s what I’m hoping for, and in some sense putting my trust in. There’s usually a key to unlocking such a miracle, though. So am I hunting hard enough?

Posted on by Yve 0