#90 Go Team!
I have been wondering recently about how many people here on Earth feel as though their life has a purpose. Personally, my mind constantly vacillates between two opposite notions: Notion “A,” that our species has a purpose, and I therefore have my own life purpose, and Notion “B”; that our reality is the resultant of some gigantic random event, so it follows that there is therefore no purpose to life, and thus, my own life has no purpose.
The odd thing that I have noticed about my binary feelings regarding my personal impressions in regards to a possible meaning of life (re-read it, it makes sense) is that in the event that either concept of mine were to be true, I think I’d be living my life exactly the same way that I always have, and currently do; that is to say, I live my life in a perpetual pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.
Whether or not there is a ‘purpose’ to my own life, I cannot deny the fact that at the age of twenty-seven, I have managed to become my own boss and I schedule 100% of my life; I am in charge of defining my own purpose. But I have discovered that being your own boss is hard a lot of the time, because I’m never sure if I’m doing a good job, a better than average job, a lousy job, or a…well, you get my point. When you are your own boss, it’s difficult to assess your own performance as an employee.
Most people, when they discover that I “work for no one,” tell me how lucky I am. And I realize why they say this, and yes, of course I want to be my own boss for exactly the reasons they imagine that I am lucky to be my own boss.
But, if you were to walk a couple of feet in my worn down, tired, un-trendy, fashion-less, and dirty shoes, then you might see why I often feel that, in regards to being my own boss, I am both extremely lucky and totally screwed; because being your own boss has its serious ups and downs.
When I was younger and still working for “the man,” I would dream of the day that I would someday be a boss, and I’d be able to put others in charge of a portion of my work, in order to do crazy things like take the day off in order to golf and relax.
Unfortunately, due to a “hopefully-only-near-term-life-altering car accident” (See STBY # 79-80 for more details) I have been suffering from all sorts of horrible achy pains in my pelvis, rib cage, and most of all in my right hip, and I have therefore been unable to play hooky from my work, meaning that I have an ocean of free time, but I cannot spend my free time playing any of the sports that I used to play prior to my accident. And my own inability to use my body the way I am so used to using it has been very hard on my psyche, sending me into periodic downfalls in which I find myself unable to properly motivate myself, both as an employee, and as a boss.
This in turn has enabled me to do something that I never, ever used to do, and that is to consider feeling sorry for myself.
And let me be very vocal about the following fact: I hate being around anyone who is currently giving in to self-pity. I consider self-pity to be among the most base of human emotions. In my mind, self pitying is a pathetic way to go about life, and I can’t imagine any scenario, not a one, in which feeling sorry for yourself does anything productive.
On November fourth, 2008, in a rare moment that lacked any and all self-pity, Americans stood up by the millions and elected Barack Obama as President, and for the most part, this was a bold act of integrity, seen as a mandate for change.
You can easily assess your life and recognize that it sort of sucks, but even with this analysis; it is still possible to NOT feel sorry for yourself. Accepting your reality and then doing something about it is the only way out of any negative period of your life, and all that self pity does is to help prolong the pain and the bad experience that you are currently “feeling sorry about.” Our nation recently chose to take the high road, and took the first step on the road to change by electing a President who has boldly proclaimed that a vote for him, is a vote for change.
So now that I’ve established my feelings in regard to self-pity, on both a personal and a national level, I’d like to relate to my readers that ever since my accident, I have been feeling like a total loser, but I have not been giving in to my urge to pity myself, and I’m proud of my country for doing the same thing in regards to the many crisis that lay at our doorstep this winter.
But what I am attempting to convey here is something deeper than politics. I’m attempting to explore human emotion, and to explore one of the aspects of being a human that seems to separate us from an animal’s existence; namely, our ability to recognize our own emotions in order to make our decisions without emotional influence.
Prior to my accident, I was quite adept at controlling my own emotions. Sometimes it would scare me when I was so easily able to change my own mood to adjust to the composite mood of the other humans I was exposed to.
But my accident has effected my reliance on mastering my own emotions. And I have therein recently come to accept the fact that I am human after all, and I am also now finally giving in to the fact that I am indeed just like everyone else, a complex machine that often does not understand exactly how it works.
I am currently living with a close friend who has extended The Olive Branch of all olive branches my way with a great housing opportunity, which in turn is designed to enable me to recuperate, and to get back on my feet, while only having to work a part time job to make ends meet.
But with all of this free time, and with no outside expectations for what I do with this time, I have recently lost my ability to truly focus on, well, anything. My mind seems to only be capable of bouncing around between various thoughts, like a ping pong ball on crack, and the one thought that dominates all the other ones is, “What is my purpose in life, if any?”
I was brought up in an affluent town and went to a high school that filled my head with grandiose notions about the purpose of a career. My high school education was completely and utterly devoid of any sort of spiritual guidance, but rich to the core in career advice. Fortunately, my parents provided the Yin to this Yang, forever instilling in me the importance of seeking true, lasting pleasure over short-sighted materialistic and ever-fleeting ephemeral career goals.
Recently, much to my personal chagrin, my emotions have been dominating my own rational ability for self-assessment, and I have been feeling utterly lost in a world where everyone else seems to be found. I look around, and I see people indulging in careers that seem to fulfill them, and I lust for a similar life.
Purpose or no purpose, I wake up each day and wonder, “what should my motivation be?” I thought that only actors were supposed to ask that question, but a lot of the time, I feel like an actor who has lost his script and doesn’t even know the director of the play. My memory is fuzzy and I can’t remember when my big “break out scene” is, but I know that it is coming up, and now I have become paranoid, because I certainly don’t want to miss out on, nor do I want to screw up my “big scene in life.”
All I do know is that one of the requisites for being a writer seems to be having a mind that never stops questioning and doubting the status quo. Naturally, due to this ever questioning mind of mine, being a writer truly tests me in regards to my ability to see myself and my writing for what they really are. I often get bogged down in questions concerning my persona, my image, my reputation, and these questions confound my ability to see who I really am, which in turn causes my emotions to run wild.
I was watching the hilariously clever television program “30 Rock” last week (Starring Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey—Check it out!) and there was a scene in which Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, is conversing with “Fake Oprah Winfrey” and “Fake Oprah” says, (I’m paraphrasing) “Liz, none of us can control our own emotions, but every one of us can control the decisions we make in regards to those emotions.”
This well placed “self help quip” was designed for laughs, but the truth behind those words resonated deeply with me at the time, and this truth still rings true in my mind as I type these words.
I am getting older, and with my age comes the wisdom it takes to begin coping with the fact that my emotions can be wild, and they are certainly unpredictable, and so if I ever want to live in a steady world of consistency, the only thing I can do about my emotions is to learn how to passively observe them and then realize how they are effecting my attitude, so that I can make the best decision for myself, at any given time.
Emotions remind me of the old adage about how alcohol inhibits your ability to make good decisions. I believe that your emotions are like alcohol; they often act as “proper decision making inhibitors.”
It’s impossible to control your emotions, but it is always possible to rise above them, and to make the right decision. The people who do this best are usually labeled as great leaders and sometimes even as heroes, because when you can make the right decision during a particularly stressful or emotionally difficult time in your life, then you have gone above and beyond your very human desire to give into your emotions, and that is truly a great achievement in and of itself.
By electing President Obama and his mandate for change, our nation has risen above it’s emotional panic-state concerning wars abroad and a world wide economic disaster, and we have done what I think was “the right thing to do;” we have elected a candidate who is asking for each and every one of us to not get bogged down in our emotional turmoil, to not turn to self pity, but to instead face the great challenges that face us, and to take some personal responsibility in solving these crisis.
For the first time in a very long time, I am very proud to be an American. I am proud of our nation for taking some pretty sour lemons and attempting to make lemonade. I am proud of our nation for showing the rest of the world that we remain a hopeful and resilient population of people dedicated to preserving the dignity and sacredness of human life. But most of all, I’m proud of the people who voted for McCain, but who are now giving all of their support to President Elect Obama in order to facilitate and ensure the best possible future for our nation.
Metaphorically speaking, our world has just been struck by a car, and we are now in the ER, but we’re going to make it. So take it from me, I just did this, and it’s not that hard. The key factor for recovery is having a positive attitude. I’m positive about that.
