Just Existing

 Knowledge - Facts, they give us this impression that we are coming to grips and a better understanding towards the totality of what human experience has to offer. As if the human experience can be itemized and inventoried. However, in the same way knowledge expands our understanding, it also narrows our vision.

Not all aspects of life are meant to be picked apart and atomized for the sake of optimization. Some aspects of life and the self are deeply intrinsic and rooted in the soul, our very being. Human experience isn't just a commodity, it is a unique tapestry of life and lived emotions. Your humanity isn't quantifiable. It cannot be optimized because it isn't labor, it isn't code in a terminal. It is life. It is "You".

We try to find the path to being a perfect human, but there is no perfect human being. And in attempting to find the answers to being our ideal self we turn to the outside and dilute the very core of our uniqueness. Influenced by those who sell us on the idea of happiness and connection as a market imperative - a way to make money off of us - not for the sake of our internal well being; We expose and dissect the most private and vulnerable parts of our selves in a very vain attempt to be come the most optimal human. But an "optimal human" isn't a better human, its not a loving human.

There a couple aspects about this that I've been considering.

The first is that when you constantly look for the answers to your problems and you find those answers outside of yourself - you are robbing yourself. When you relinquish the hard questions and hard decisions away from yourself you also relinquish your grip on life. Your life is no longer your own. It is of great help to seek guidance or advice but not if it is in cost of your own agency. You must take actions because they are what you want to push forwards to. When your solutions and ideas are your own then your life is yours. The obstacles you face are ones you are more willing to overcome because they are obstacles you chose to face. Not the obstacles the most calculable best route had you face. Your progress is a result of you. There is the flip side of this, where when you seek answers outside of yourself what you'll turn up is hopelessness. Cries of impossible odds, that crabs in a bucket mentality where every time you begin your escape you're brought right back down. In the perpetual company of participants to the race to the bottom. When we speak of institutional or systematic issues we often forget the point of it is awareness, so that we may fight against and overcome such things. Not use them to validate our stagnancy. Yes, the circumstances in which you were born in may have very well put you much further away from the finish line, but you can still win.

The second is that we may be too focused on defining ourselves so much so that we lock parts of our personality and experience away. To define is to narrow, make brief and explainable. In coming to grips with ourselves we rigidly give the various aspects of internal selves labels. To feel like we are part of a community, to lessen the possibility of scrutiny and confusion from others, we will sand off all the corners and craft an easily accessible (boring) version of us. We get caught up in the outward presentation we forget the person we truly are. The chaotic, unruly and sometimes ugly internal self. But with the chaos is also beauty and moving expression. Those parts, they can't really be put into words. I think in giving ourselves the grace to not define those parts to allow them the full breadth of their expression, without the narrowing terms or words, we allow those parts to move us. We can feel more. When we try to quantify and explain the most abstract and spiritual parts of ourselves we diminish their very strength and weight.