About

What about me?

I think if I do this at the right time I’ll portray myself as some kind of emotional, depressed, hyper anxious mess of a person, and it would be totally true; a factual depiction. But what is factual is not always whole. I could also present myself to you as loyal, kind and smug in my own overconfidence as a witty writer–given the right time of day–and that would also be true. But it wouldn’t be me. Not entirely.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been good at creating about me sections because I never want to stick to the tried and true: the quick blurb about who I am, where I’m from, what I studied in school, what I do for a living and my purpose for doing this thing (whatever the order, I don’t know). I could tell you my interests. I could speak about my life calling, the thought that this whole blog experience just feels like what I ought to be doing now. But I don’t want to give it all away in the beginning.

The fact is, I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing here. I know that I’ve had a lot to think about over many years and some of it has changed me; some of it has disappeared, some has made me a cynical old man, and some given me hope for the future. I used to think I was really smart, the smartest guy in the room. Way too smart to ever be productive because I was burdened with all this freaking intelligence. I was edgy, I guess, but never outwardly arrogant.

I came to some big realizations about myself and about the universe when I was floundering in college, and at the time I thought I was discovering something profound. I was actually just tearing down my own foundations without accounting for any kind of replacement. Rather than reshape my identity, I broke it entirely. I became empty inside. I believed in some interesting concepts that I now know are dangerous when stumbled upon and considered without guidance.

A quote from one of my favorite television series, The Legend of Korra, goes: “Let go your earthly tether. Enter the void. Empty, and become wind.” I heard this quote three years ago when I watched Korra for the first time with a friend, and I became obsessed with it. It perfectly captured my own personal beliefs about existence and the universe and the unending quest for happiness.

For context, the quote comes from an ancient air bender named Guru Laghima who was the first to discover the secret of weightlessness, giving him the power of flight, and it is literally a mantra used to help other air benders to achieve this awesome feat. We see the brilliant antagonist of the third season, Zaheer, recite the quote frequently and eventually gain the ability to fly as well.

To me, the quote carries much deeper meaning than simply unlocking the secret to flight. To let go of one’s earthly tether means to rid oneself of all worldly distractions, or at least to disconnect from them. It is the buddhist idea of impermanence. It is minimalism. It is having the willpower to put down the phone and quit obsessing over Instagram likes or Reddit karma.

To enter the void is much more serious. It is to go into parts unknown. To reach beyond your comfort zone. It is the backwards trust fall into hands you cannot see but also the thrill of diving head first into the deep black waters of an old quarry. It is knowing the risk and doing it anyway. I have a very cringey poster on my wall that says “be scared and do it anyway.” I am not ashamed.

To empty, and become wind has the most encouraging message, I think, but also the darkest. It echoes the letting go sentiment of the first half of the quote, but also invokes a feeling of fatefulness; that the act of becoming the wind means we lose any self control. That we are now at the whims of nature herself, gliding through this life without any freedom to choose where to go. Wind is air flowing between high and low pressure. It is a moving of heat and moisture. It is totally governed by a vastly complex system which our eyes can never see. The cogs remain hidden. It is up to us whether we push back and suffer, or if we lie back and fly.

I wrote a story nearly ten years ago about a boy who doesn’t fit in with his peers. The boy carries a flamboyant bag that was given to him by his buddhist grandmother and in the beginning of the story, some of the other boys in his class tease him and throw his bag in the dirt. The bag itself isn’t so important, but rather, what the bag represents. It is a badge the boy wears that signifies he is different. Those of us who don’t fit in always seem to stick out. We become easy targets for those who are uncomfortable around people who are other.

In the end of the story, not so discreetly titled “Where Wind Will Take You,” the boy with the bag disappears after a huge dust devil comes and swallows him up. The boy in the story, while often the butt of jokes and the object of scorn, never gets down on himself. He is never upset or sad. Never on the surface, anyway. And I wanted the story to have an uplifting message: that those who are different don’t choose to be. They only accept who they are and allow the universe to carry them forward. It is the rest of us who are choosing to be the same, to wrestle with the universe, and for that we are suffering.

To empty and become wind is very much a Taoist message. It mimics the Taoist concept of wu wei, or non-action (literally “without exertion”). I first discovered taoist thought when I was in college and I would get lost for hours on an old website called stumbleupon, which would sift through the web and bring you to interesting sites at random based on your preselected set of criteria. Religion and Eastern philosophy were on my list of preferred content so I came across many sites and youtube videos that introduced me to Taoism and wu wei.

After stumbleupon I found Reddit, where I could self-curate my homepage. I subscribed to subreddits like /r/Buddhism, /r/Zen, /r/Taoism, and others. I learned everything I know about these Eastern ideas from links aggregated on Reddit and from self-posts from other Reddit users who were all either self-professed followers of these Eastern philosophies or were equally as curious and naive as me, or both.

I listened to Alan Watts lectures for hours, and that was both one of the best and worst things I could have done. Watts has a way of simplifying and unifying much of Eastern thought that makes it all very appealing for young “spiritual” westerners who are on a journey to discover something new and exotic and freeing, who are fed up with the traditional Western Christian ideas of their parents. Buddhism and Taoism allow you to practice something bound in tradition and steeped in ritual, but they don’t necessarily require you to leap into some irrational belief system such as the literal second coming of Jesus, or the concept of Heaven and Hell. They feel very reasoned, to me, which is refreshing.

Unfortunately, these videos and reddit posts–my independent exploration of these new ideas–were all supplemented by copious amounts of marijuana. My mind was in a state of constant curiosity but reinforced by fear and anxiety. This is where the story turns dark. It is during this period of my life that I began to tear away my foundations. I rejected my Christian upbringing. I rejected my old friends from school. I rejected my own education in favor of a kind of forced non-doing that I believed was akin to the Taoist concept of wu wei, but was really just rebellion and laziness. I told myself many times when stressful things happened that I don’t need to do anything, that the universe always sorts itself out.

I wrote apocalyptic stories about craggy bearded old men climbing down a jagged cliff to collect fish from a net to eat raw right there on the cliffside. And stories about evil people succeeding because that’s the way the world works. I marvelled at stories like Bartleby, the Scrivener for all the wrong reasons, and I fell in love with Albert Camus and his Mythe de Sysiphe. I broke up with my past only to find myself wading helpless in an ocean of ideas and philosophies that I was too young, too naive, too dumb to sort through and build something back up around me that was healthy. I thought I was brilliant for even considering things like existentialism, absurdism, Taoism and Buddhism. I thought I was unique for having discovered Becket’s Waiting for Godot totally on my own without any cues from professors. It is only in this moment that I realize the entire point of that play is how easy it is to ascribe meaning to any weightless platitude: Be scared and do it anyway.

 

But now…

Things are different for me today. This about me section is really an essay, because that’s what I do. I write things down, hopefully as a way for me to process how I’m feeling at any given moment, and as I stated above, depending on when I decide to write, you either get woeful angst and depression, or you get uplifting optimism. I think both states of being are important. They exist in a constant flux, a yin and yang of emotion. Without one, the other bears no meaning, much like the universe, as Watts would say, when compared to nothingness.

As for this blog, I am writing because I have made goals for myself. I have always had ambitions to become a writer, but I lacked in the followthrough. I like to blame my insistence on doing nothing for that–wu wei. Really, it’s a combination of fear, anxiety, laziness, and complacency.

Fear that I’m not actually good at this, which may be true. But I have allowed my fear of incompetence to prevent me from exercising and perfecting a skill that must be practiced. Writing is a practice, not a gift.

Anxiety that comes from fear. Anxiety from years of denial about certain parts of my life, and from years of smoking weed. Anxiety because I am incredibly self-conscious and self-obsessed.

Laziness and complacency because I have been given a lot in life. I am privileged. My parents are too kind to me because they want me to succeed. But I suppose they failed to realize that it takes effort to succeed, and when I get help from them, I don’t have to expend as much effort.

I am writing because I am rebuilding my foundation. I am exploring old ideas and new ones hopefully through a better lens of skepticism and scholarly curiosity. I am finally allowing myself to grow up–I hope. The first step is to give myself something to reach for. The second is to push myself; to set reasonable goals, and to craft plans to achieve them. This blog won’t be entirely personal. I have plans to write about politics, religion, the media, philosophy, video games, books I read, current events, etc. I also write fiction, and I will post short stories every now and then. That is the goal, anyway.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Once a week is my plan. Maybe you will come along with me on this journey.