One of the things I have learned in my conversations with the psychologist is that I have for a long time tried to be more than myself. The silly-sad thing is that probably means I have ended up being less than myself instead. I do love irony.
“You enjoy a battle,” he said.
The irony of that is its truth. I am a peace-loving warrior, a sculptor of life. Some of us like to have a framework on which to hang life – religion, and ideology (and, yes, that includes religion), rules. A lot of us, actually.
Me? I question the framework/s on which I am told to hang my life. I’d say it’s an obsession, but it’s more like just how I am made. I want peace, I seek peace for myself, my family and the world, and yet my very make up probably excludes me from it. As I said, I question the framework. I am the, “Yes, but…” person in the class. I delight good teachers and severely irritate bad ones.
I wanted to oppose my psychologist’s observation, but few truer words have been said of me. It is my very quest for peace that keeps my cudgels raised. To me, there can be no peace if it is not a peace wrought from perfection and utopia. Shake your head, mumble about how happiness is found in accepting life as it is. Perhaps so, but is happiness peace? Perhaps, if you take the approach that it arrives when you no longer care about what happens to you or around you, when you reach that Nirvana of untouchableness and inner peace. Yes, I can buy that. I just can’t truly buy it for myself. It does not fit.
I tried, I really tried, but I do care, deeply, about stuff around me, from corrupt politicians to whether there is a God. I can swim in untouched bliss about these things only for so long. Them my questions break through. There are many hands up in the great classroom that is my life. (I need to find something positive to do with the anger I feel about the injustices in life, and I am slowly learning how to do this, but the road is long, with many a winding turn.)
From small I tilted at rules, paradigms, I questioned all and everything. I pawed at things like cat with a mouse, and often I gave up without a satisfactory answer, exhausted by the limits of my feeble brain.
There is a point at which people either have to succumb to the presiding paradigms or go mad. So far I have succumbed, and I am both glad and frustrated by this. Glad that reality kicks in and I am able to operate as a functional member of society, glad that I am able to see through at least some of the flaws in the way in which we run our society. If I really let my mind run I would follow Frederich Nietzsche in the horse kissing stakes. I can see exactly how he got there.
I remember the awe-inspiring freedom of university. Suddenly I was actually asked to pick at the scab. I loved it. I had found my metier: thinking, questioning. I had found a place where my innate tendency to do so was welcomed and rewarded. I felt warm and content, my nest, I found, was out there in the agora of ideas. But university is an interlude, or it was for me, and I also wanted very much to be part of the world. I wanted to be an active member of society. To play the game you must accept the rules, at least for the time you are playing the game. I don’t think there is anything wrong, however, with awareness that you are playing the game, or of the ridiculousness of the rules.
And, boy, are there rules. Loads of them. Many people love rules as much as they love ideologies (actually, ideologies are just sets of rules). I love them and I hate them. Rules and ideologies mean we can judge others – she’s too fat, he’s chosen the wrong God, they have adopted the wrong sexual orientation … The older I get the more I realise that judging people by any human rules is completely unjustified (and, yes, I accept that too is a rule).
“If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything,” is a saying attributed to Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the US. I don’t agree. I am not sure I exactly what I stand for, not much seems worth it, and yet I suppose this entire blog shows I do stand for the humanist/ rationalist (much though I hate -isms) point of view. There are many who can attack that on many valid points. But maybe that’s my strength: that I realise that. That, I hope, is my strength: I acknowledge the weakness of my assumptions and beliefs.
I like Socrates more and more. I remember my first year philosophy book began with the one quote of his that has come to define him in the same way “I think, therefore I am” defines Rene Descartes. It is “The unexamined life is not worth living”. It could be my motto.
People often counter that with, “The unlived life is not worth examining”. Also true.
Perhaps this, also from Descartes, defines me: “For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance”.
I read a great piece the other day about how the popular modern quest for happiness is not the answer to the question of life (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/theres-more-to-life-than-being-happy/266805/). The happiness quest, of which I am previously guilty, has given me little, the quest for meaning has given me a lot. Not all of it has been easy, but then, I don’t think “easy” is the answer. Not for me, anyway.
Someone a few months ago told me they were sad for me because I refuse to submit to life/ husband/ take your pick. I was angry. I am no longer angry, I am not sad for them either. I can see why submission might work for many. I will, however, take my cue from my favourite musician, Bruce Springsteen:
“I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover’s bed
with a wide open country in my eyes
and these romantic dreams in my head….
Blood brothers in the stormy night with a vow to defend
No retreat no surrender.” *
And I hope he forgives me for mangling the order of these words.
**This post is dedicated to my Dad, who is also a Seeker in life. Something I only truly realised the other day. Thanks, Dad: I realise now how much you encouraged my quest. I love you.
Delivered. 