Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Monday, July 18, 2011
The Accelerating Oblivion Race with no Finish Line.
As I get older the passage of time and the sequence of events that I experience become increasingly perceptively transient. Perhaps it is a symptom of growing older, and maybe it has something to do with the age group of which I am a part. Regardless of the reason, events accelerate more and more and I find myself astounded with how quickly time passes and how trivial the actions of myself and all the people around me seem. All around people live, they get into relationships, they get promoted, they graduate, they move, they achieve and they strive to succeed. Lately all of these endeavors have left me cold in that my mind continually seems to focus on the bigger end goal -- in other words, to what ends do we toil away in our little lives? Do we work towards some benevolent 'greater good'? Are we really furthering humankind by getting a degree and working a 40 hour a week job for the rest of our lives? Is artistic expression of any more value? For every 'Mona Lisa' or 'Sistine Chapel', a thousand thousand artistic expressions will have absolutely zero effect on the rest of the world. Movies are made and given increasing importance, but what does it add? A distraction; a subterfuge to divert attention to the fact that we are all hurtling light speed towards an ambiguous ending?
What's the point?
Perhaps the point is selfish. Maybe life and all of our secret machinations should be geared exclusively towards our own subjective pleasures. Maybe we should travel the world to see everything we can. Maybe we get the degrees so that we have the money to buy all the nice things that we believe we should have to obtain a complete life. Selfishly we can pretty much have it all, or better yet anything that we define 'it all' to be. Maybe. As for me, I find that a subjective existence is perhaps personally rewarding, but ultimately meaningless. As masters of our own destinies, we are in control to the reaches of our own little confined worlds. I can see how that would be enough for some, but personally (and perhaps ironically -- subjectively) it seems hollow. Anyone can be astonishing if they're setting the bar for being it.
If I was being honest, I think I am probably complicating matters far beyond what they should be. Fulfillment is subjective. One man's success is another man's wallowing. In the end, does any of it have meaning beyond the fact that we have satisfied ourselves? Is that enough? I enjoy my life. I do things. I do as many things as I can, but instead of feeling accomplished I wonder if I fill my life with events to ignore the fact that I'm doing it because I can't handle what's left without them.
Life is a series of events chained together to create a personal and unique timeline that ends up defining our existence. What if that series of events are just an unstoppable collection of moments we blindly choose as we miss the fact that time will run out before we ever get close to putting it in perspective? The more we do the faster time ticks away and sooner rather than later we turn around and realize we're just a series of memories that may or may not matter. And by the time we've realized this, isn't it too late to get context? Time is too big and we are too small to ever understand it the way its meant to be. I probably have a lot of life left to live. Still, I can't shake the feeling that the rest of it will play out fairly predictably; universally speaking. I'm racing towards oblivion at the variable speed of time and no matter what I do I can't seem to find how that counts. Is that the point?
What's the point?
Perhaps the point is selfish. Maybe life and all of our secret machinations should be geared exclusively towards our own subjective pleasures. Maybe we should travel the world to see everything we can. Maybe we get the degrees so that we have the money to buy all the nice things that we believe we should have to obtain a complete life. Selfishly we can pretty much have it all, or better yet anything that we define 'it all' to be. Maybe. As for me, I find that a subjective existence is perhaps personally rewarding, but ultimately meaningless. As masters of our own destinies, we are in control to the reaches of our own little confined worlds. I can see how that would be enough for some, but personally (and perhaps ironically -- subjectively) it seems hollow. Anyone can be astonishing if they're setting the bar for being it.
If I was being honest, I think I am probably complicating matters far beyond what they should be. Fulfillment is subjective. One man's success is another man's wallowing. In the end, does any of it have meaning beyond the fact that we have satisfied ourselves? Is that enough? I enjoy my life. I do things. I do as many things as I can, but instead of feeling accomplished I wonder if I fill my life with events to ignore the fact that I'm doing it because I can't handle what's left without them.
Life is a series of events chained together to create a personal and unique timeline that ends up defining our existence. What if that series of events are just an unstoppable collection of moments we blindly choose as we miss the fact that time will run out before we ever get close to putting it in perspective? The more we do the faster time ticks away and sooner rather than later we turn around and realize we're just a series of memories that may or may not matter. And by the time we've realized this, isn't it too late to get context? Time is too big and we are too small to ever understand it the way its meant to be. I probably have a lot of life left to live. Still, I can't shake the feeling that the rest of it will play out fairly predictably; universally speaking. I'm racing towards oblivion at the variable speed of time and no matter what I do I can't seem to find how that counts. Is that the point?
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
The Unforeseen Fallibility of Adulthood.
When we are young we look up to the adults around us with a subconscious certainty that they perceive the world in a way that is inherently clearer than our own. Perhaps, we may have pondered, they are privy to some revelation about the way of things that children are not yet aware. Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I imagine many of us grow up with the expectation of discovering a moment of clarity and understanding of all the lingering questions we've accrued as we aged. Of course this one crystallizing moment rarely appears. The reality of the situation is that we reach a predetermined point in our lives and the title of "adult" is in some cases thrust upon us, leaving us no wiser and no more aware of the complexities of living than we were before. If being an adult subverts our lifelong expectations, how then do we define "adulthood" not just for ourselves but as a substantial and integral part of our lives?
It stands to reason that because the aforementioned expectations of becoming an "adult" can obviously vary from individual to individual, that the notion of being adult would manifest differently for everyone. The real question becomes what it is that we inevitably define as the aspects of ourselves that allow us to identify as "grown up"? One can imagine many things that would fit this purview, from the completion of our organizational education to the birth of our first child -- the list is vast but perhaps categorically symmetrical to the taking on of greater responsibility in the structure of civilization. Does this answer the question then? Are we adults in as much of the amount of responsibility we find ourselves tasked? Perhaps partially. While this fulfills to a degree the functional aspect of adulthood; the "omnipotent" nature we perceived as children needs to be reconciled to reality. It's fair to assume that aging and, congruently, being an adult bring with them the facets of greater knowledge in a general sense. Therefore perhaps it is proper to define "adulthood" as the sum total of our lifetime of experiences; be they emotional, practical or otherwise.
Using our 'experiences' to measure the proximity to being grown up is inherently a tricky proposition. Experience is, both transcendentally and practically, by nature a largely subjective thing. The weight, meaning, and amount of any given experience(s) will vary wildly depending on the individual and their unique perceptions. It follows then that adulthood itself is equally as nebulous in terms of explanation. Legally, of course, being an adult is a simple matter of time and/or age, but as a state of being is it not much more intangible? This entire writing thus far has gone to great lengths to elucidate the delusive nature of adulthood, so how then do we ever know that we are indeed adults?
To me the answer is choice. Adulthood is a title we either consciously assign to ourselves, or on some level we resign ourselves to being -- sometimes without even realizing we have. If indeed adulthood is a resultant of a choice, then by nature it is distinctly unlike being a child or adolescent. As children, we are thus by virtue of the fact we are physically small; incapable of taking care of ourselves; dependent. These are predominantly irreversible truths. As adolescents we are defined by our transient states. We are no longer children, yet we have not yet made the choice to be whatever comes next. Being an adult is the perpetual 'whatever comes next' -- a state so personally illusory that it proves hard to define. We are adults for the majority of our lives and yet we are as such for no other reason than we are not immediately anything else. This is precisely the cause of the wealth of misperceptions about adulthood when we are young: a fundamental lack of understanding as to the very nature of what it means to consider oneself "adult". Adulthood then is a personal representation for every individual the understanding and acceptance of their own metaphysical 'experiences' and the resulting choice to accept that evaluation as emblematic of one's entire self.
Being an adult is something that ends up being wholly unlike anything we ever expected growing up. Far from being a state in which we have discovered all the answers to life, it is more a sense of facing the world in acknowledgement of everything we've done before. Many struggle with the idea that they may be adults, and it is perfectly understandable to do so. Choosing to be an adult is not only an intense assessment of self, but the final affirmation of living in answer to oneself exclusively -- a realization that is in no small part daunting and enormous.
It stands to reason that because the aforementioned expectations of becoming an "adult" can obviously vary from individual to individual, that the notion of being adult would manifest differently for everyone. The real question becomes what it is that we inevitably define as the aspects of ourselves that allow us to identify as "grown up"? One can imagine many things that would fit this purview, from the completion of our organizational education to the birth of our first child -- the list is vast but perhaps categorically symmetrical to the taking on of greater responsibility in the structure of civilization. Does this answer the question then? Are we adults in as much of the amount of responsibility we find ourselves tasked? Perhaps partially. While this fulfills to a degree the functional aspect of adulthood; the "omnipotent" nature we perceived as children needs to be reconciled to reality. It's fair to assume that aging and, congruently, being an adult bring with them the facets of greater knowledge in a general sense. Therefore perhaps it is proper to define "adulthood" as the sum total of our lifetime of experiences; be they emotional, practical or otherwise.
Using our 'experiences' to measure the proximity to being grown up is inherently a tricky proposition. Experience is, both transcendentally and practically, by nature a largely subjective thing. The weight, meaning, and amount of any given experience(s) will vary wildly depending on the individual and their unique perceptions. It follows then that adulthood itself is equally as nebulous in terms of explanation. Legally, of course, being an adult is a simple matter of time and/or age, but as a state of being is it not much more intangible? This entire writing thus far has gone to great lengths to elucidate the delusive nature of adulthood, so how then do we ever know that we are indeed adults?
To me the answer is choice. Adulthood is a title we either consciously assign to ourselves, or on some level we resign ourselves to being -- sometimes without even realizing we have. If indeed adulthood is a resultant of a choice, then by nature it is distinctly unlike being a child or adolescent. As children, we are thus by virtue of the fact we are physically small; incapable of taking care of ourselves; dependent. These are predominantly irreversible truths. As adolescents we are defined by our transient states. We are no longer children, yet we have not yet made the choice to be whatever comes next. Being an adult is the perpetual 'whatever comes next' -- a state so personally illusory that it proves hard to define. We are adults for the majority of our lives and yet we are as such for no other reason than we are not immediately anything else. This is precisely the cause of the wealth of misperceptions about adulthood when we are young: a fundamental lack of understanding as to the very nature of what it means to consider oneself "adult". Adulthood then is a personal representation for every individual the understanding and acceptance of their own metaphysical 'experiences' and the resulting choice to accept that evaluation as emblematic of one's entire self.
Being an adult is something that ends up being wholly unlike anything we ever expected growing up. Far from being a state in which we have discovered all the answers to life, it is more a sense of facing the world in acknowledgement of everything we've done before. Many struggle with the idea that they may be adults, and it is perfectly understandable to do so. Choosing to be an adult is not only an intense assessment of self, but the final affirmation of living in answer to oneself exclusively -- a realization that is in no small part daunting and enormous.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Packrat Syndrome
I was at a store the other day with my mom, and we were buying things. As you do. Along the way I idly began to catalogue the sheer volume of all of the things on the endless shelves and their myriad uses. I find it staggering to think that within the hundreds of various products to be found in any given mass retail store, there are millions of people who will find use of them. I guess it's all about minutia. Next time you're in a tall building or have a really good view, take a look at the nearest street or freeway. Hundreds of thousands of cars crawl like ants endlessly into the horizon. Now visualize that each car holds at least one human being and that the car they are driving is likely only one of hundreds of possessions that person is likely to have. Now multiply that generous "hundreds" of possessions by the number of cars you can see at any given moment. My point is that humanity seems completely tied to the things that we own. We surround ourselves with things and items and trinkets. The question of course is necessity. How much do we really need and why do we really need it?
Obviously many of the things we own come from a place of satisfying a basic need. Our homes, our means of conveyance, our food and the various storage thereof, and our clothing all stem from a reasonably justifiable life requirement. Another category of things that we collect revolve around our entertainment. While we find ways to keep ourselves busy in life, obviously much joy is derived from the things we undertake in our "free time". TV's, sports equipment, cameras, video games, books, papers, pencils, and various other and infinite items of amusement fill our lives from every angle. Lastly, we collect items as a means of memory or remembrance. This a much more broad subset that encompasses aspects of all of the categories of possession, and it is likely the aspect that causes the most problems. Pictures of family and friends, mementos of dear or lost acquaintances, heirlooms, and items attached to specific and resonant moments in our lives could all feasibly fall under the purview of acceptable collection. Even though at the most basic and essential level these items don't serve to prolong or support your living from day to day, we allow these items on a primal level as proof of our existence. No, items collected due to memory are most problematic when tied together with a sense of identity that is directly proportional to our happiness.
Refer to the aforementioned 'entertainment' possessions. Indeed while many of the forms of amusement we dabble are in essence useless in a Darwinian sense, human kind has arguably always shown a need for some kind of activity to balance idle moments. The question becomes what actions are taken when such items outlive their usefulness? For many, things are stored away and slowly fade from our consciousness over time. In some cases these items lose none of their use and upon some random thought-string we are able to recall it and put it back into use in the ebb and flow of our lives. In many more cases than some would like to admit, though, the items we store away tend to pile up and entrench us in our places both physically and figuratively. I call this the Packrat Syndrome, and it has both positive and negative effects on everyone.
As I stated earlier, it all comes down to necessity. In a purely black and white, cut and dry view of the world the only items we would own and keep are the ones that would suite us in the pursuit of living. I suppose this would come down to clothes to protect against the elements, a steady source of food, and some kind of shelter in which to seek rest or retreat. Some of these could be disputed themselves upon further scrutiny. Thus it would seem that 'necessity' is a subjective term. While some would consider dozens upon dozens of old shoeboxes filled with decades old photos stacked in an attic somewhere 'necessary' to happiness, there are just as many who may find this limiting. One of the most common trends that come with the passing of time is our joint accumulation of possession. As we age we collect and inherit and create more and more things by which we identify ourselves to the point that as we age it becomes harder and harder to simply move one's life without great effort. And here is the great debate of necessity. To some, filling one's life with things represents a natural settling down; perhaps even a planting of personal roots of which all things moving forward in life blossom. To others, accumulation is only a limiter to the things we can freely do in our lives.
The lease on my apartment is going to be up in about three months' time. I'm having a considerably hard time deciding whether to renew the lease and stay longer, or pack everything up and move home for a while. As I had these thoughts, I took stock of my living space and all the things I had accumulated over the previous year. Even though I am only one person living alone in a relatively small space, the sheer amount of 'things' I've stashed and piled is kind of impressive. Every drawer has something in it, every closet or nook or cranny... I think the oddest moment of clarity was looking over my bookshelf. I do not read an excessive amount, but I have read a good deal of different books. As I skimmed the myriad titles and genres, I could not help but ask myself what the chances were I would ever reasonably read some of the books I saw again. If I were being honest with myself, some books just as well never may be opened again outside of passing fancy. It is here that I experienced the problematic sense memory identifying attached to many people and many possessions. Regardless of their use, these were my books that I liked enough to read. Some of them were gifts. Some of them were really, really cool at the time. It wasn't long before I knew I couldn't easily part with any of them. The books had become tied to my sense of self. They defined me.
And so it is with people the world over. A long while back I had a friend who spoke to me about having to pair down their life and thusly their possessions in order to allow for ease of movement from place to place. At the time I remember thinking about all the things I called my own and what I would take with me and what I could part with if the opportunity ever arose. It's not an easy task slimming down your precious possessions to the things that really matter, and those things that do last really begin to matter in a huge way. I guess the truth is that we are the things we surround ourselves with and, like it or not, we identify ourselves by them. In the end it all comes down to necessity: the things we can't do without that define us outside of our own internal sense of self. There's a part of me that wishes I was more libertarian on the issue, but I think we all need something outside of ourselves to remind us of who we are. An objective identifier against a vast ocean of subjective definitions though not at all less personal. Life is an amazing journey of things and the things and people we surround ourselves with. Deciding what we can and cannot live without is just one facet of that fantastic voyage, and one that we all should take account.
Obviously many of the things we own come from a place of satisfying a basic need. Our homes, our means of conveyance, our food and the various storage thereof, and our clothing all stem from a reasonably justifiable life requirement. Another category of things that we collect revolve around our entertainment. While we find ways to keep ourselves busy in life, obviously much joy is derived from the things we undertake in our "free time". TV's, sports equipment, cameras, video games, books, papers, pencils, and various other and infinite items of amusement fill our lives from every angle. Lastly, we collect items as a means of memory or remembrance. This a much more broad subset that encompasses aspects of all of the categories of possession, and it is likely the aspect that causes the most problems. Pictures of family and friends, mementos of dear or lost acquaintances, heirlooms, and items attached to specific and resonant moments in our lives could all feasibly fall under the purview of acceptable collection. Even though at the most basic and essential level these items don't serve to prolong or support your living from day to day, we allow these items on a primal level as proof of our existence. No, items collected due to memory are most problematic when tied together with a sense of identity that is directly proportional to our happiness.
Refer to the aforementioned 'entertainment' possessions. Indeed while many of the forms of amusement we dabble are in essence useless in a Darwinian sense, human kind has arguably always shown a need for some kind of activity to balance idle moments. The question becomes what actions are taken when such items outlive their usefulness? For many, things are stored away and slowly fade from our consciousness over time. In some cases these items lose none of their use and upon some random thought-string we are able to recall it and put it back into use in the ebb and flow of our lives. In many more cases than some would like to admit, though, the items we store away tend to pile up and entrench us in our places both physically and figuratively. I call this the Packrat Syndrome, and it has both positive and negative effects on everyone.
As I stated earlier, it all comes down to necessity. In a purely black and white, cut and dry view of the world the only items we would own and keep are the ones that would suite us in the pursuit of living. I suppose this would come down to clothes to protect against the elements, a steady source of food, and some kind of shelter in which to seek rest or retreat. Some of these could be disputed themselves upon further scrutiny. Thus it would seem that 'necessity' is a subjective term. While some would consider dozens upon dozens of old shoeboxes filled with decades old photos stacked in an attic somewhere 'necessary' to happiness, there are just as many who may find this limiting. One of the most common trends that come with the passing of time is our joint accumulation of possession. As we age we collect and inherit and create more and more things by which we identify ourselves to the point that as we age it becomes harder and harder to simply move one's life without great effort. And here is the great debate of necessity. To some, filling one's life with things represents a natural settling down; perhaps even a planting of personal roots of which all things moving forward in life blossom. To others, accumulation is only a limiter to the things we can freely do in our lives.
The lease on my apartment is going to be up in about three months' time. I'm having a considerably hard time deciding whether to renew the lease and stay longer, or pack everything up and move home for a while. As I had these thoughts, I took stock of my living space and all the things I had accumulated over the previous year. Even though I am only one person living alone in a relatively small space, the sheer amount of 'things' I've stashed and piled is kind of impressive. Every drawer has something in it, every closet or nook or cranny... I think the oddest moment of clarity was looking over my bookshelf. I do not read an excessive amount, but I have read a good deal of different books. As I skimmed the myriad titles and genres, I could not help but ask myself what the chances were I would ever reasonably read some of the books I saw again. If I were being honest with myself, some books just as well never may be opened again outside of passing fancy. It is here that I experienced the problematic sense memory identifying attached to many people and many possessions. Regardless of their use, these were my books that I liked enough to read. Some of them were gifts. Some of them were really, really cool at the time. It wasn't long before I knew I couldn't easily part with any of them. The books had become tied to my sense of self. They defined me.
And so it is with people the world over. A long while back I had a friend who spoke to me about having to pair down their life and thusly their possessions in order to allow for ease of movement from place to place. At the time I remember thinking about all the things I called my own and what I would take with me and what I could part with if the opportunity ever arose. It's not an easy task slimming down your precious possessions to the things that really matter, and those things that do last really begin to matter in a huge way. I guess the truth is that we are the things we surround ourselves with and, like it or not, we identify ourselves by them. In the end it all comes down to necessity: the things we can't do without that define us outside of our own internal sense of self. There's a part of me that wishes I was more libertarian on the issue, but I think we all need something outside of ourselves to remind us of who we are. An objective identifier against a vast ocean of subjective definitions though not at all less personal. Life is an amazing journey of things and the things and people we surround ourselves with. Deciding what we can and cannot live without is just one facet of that fantastic voyage, and one that we all should take account.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
'If It Wasn't This... It'd Be Something Else': Lessons from Elizabethtown.
This post serves as both a movie review and a general musing on a number of subjects spurred by extremely late night and sleep-deprived thinkings. Plural. The movie Elizabethtown is a really awesomely fantastic piece of cinema. It stars both Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom, and follows the story of Drew (Bloom) returning to his familial roots on the eve of his father's death and following a monumental professional failure on his part. Along the way he meets the quirky and unendingly optimistic Claire (Dunst) and he discovers the meaning of family, of connections, and most importantly the value of embracing and living life. Elizabethtown is a deeply flawed movie on many fronts, but it's a beautiful collision of imperfection that in and of itself is in fact perfect. Both Dunst and Bloom demonstrate a unique ability to completely miss the subtlety of their characters, yet somehow in those exact failures they create immensely entertaining people who, while in no way resembling real humans, serve as wonderful cyphers for bigger commentaries on the plot and life. I think it's the writing that goes a long way to salvage what I categorize as missteps in the lead performances. For instance, Drew is a decent guy who made a gigantic mistake and has screwy priorities. Orlando Bloom seems to lack the subtlety needed to portray externally a man who has been ruined professionally, has no real friends, and has recently lost a father whom he actually did care very much about. All of this is of course volleyed between his internal process and the shocks of being surrounded by a loving yet insane family (though 'loving' and 'insane' seem redundant when mentioning family). You never get the sense that Drew is experiencing any of this, yet you find yourself willingly filling in the blanks. Bloom succeeds in playing a man out of his comfort zone going with the punches for better or worse. Whether this is a result of Bloom having to ape an American accent (of which he ranks not the best but also not the worst -- see the Playstation 3 game Heavy Rain for the WORST American accents ever) or the fact that he's an Irishman in the American South is irrelevant. He's very likable, it works, and you relate. Kirsten Dunst on the other hand ends up making a character who seems like she should be at least mildly believable into the most cool, cute, and IMAGINARY figure in the movie. I think the main problem here is that Dunst plays Claire with absolutely no vulnerability -- something that in reality a person like Claire would be rife with. Still, you can't help but be drawn to her and find yourself smiling and wishing that a girl like that would come down from space on her unicorn (because she's imaginary) and set straight all of the issues in your life.
The most successful aspect of Elizabethtown is its overall tone. The film is dripping with the warmness of family and friends, the texture of the Southern States, the beautiful calamity of being lost in life and connecting with someone on a deep level, and the joy of being alive. Like almost every aspect of this movie, the tone succeeds despite itself. Elizabethtown begins as a bleak look into a man with nothing to lose's life. From here it feels like it does not know whether it intends to be dark comedy, slice-of-life storytelling, over-the-top pastiche, heartwarming, or revelatory. Despite this schizophrenia, the film again mashes into a wonderful canvas of emotion and confusion that while perhaps not narratively effective hearkens to a truly analogous version of how life can sometimes feel. This is all a fancy way of saying that I don't necessarily know why Elizabethtown resonates so resoundingly with me, but it certainly does. The movie is only helped by one of the most appropriate and effective soundtracks since Garden State. Seriously, go buy (download) it and take a drive somewhere. Beautiful.
The most charming thing Elizabethtown does is remain unendingly positive. It shows that even in the face of something as terrible as the death of a loved one, the ability to come together with the people you love and who love you is more powerful than any tragedy. And this is true both in life and this film. A family is a thing that surrounds you when you're hurt, and even though it can't necessarily heal you it allows you to be safe and deal with it all safe from the pressures of real life. It is paramount to what a family is in the first place that such safety can be found. A family is essentially a group of people who accept you on some level no matter what because you are part of them on a deeply personal (and sometimes biological) level. But just because some of the regular complications of human interaction are foregone does not mean that a family is any more personally together than anyone else. Instead it's a group of people bound together all of whom are trying their best to figure life out under the shared mandate of understanding each other. It's not always pretty and it doesn't always work, but the most rewarding thing to do sometimes is just bask in the chaos of it all and experience life together.
That's the last lesson to be gleaned from Elizabethtown; that being alive is easy, but that sometimes living is the hardest thing to do. This is why despite the fact that Claire seems oddly well-adjusted and above life's rigors, the viewer is drawn to someone who so fully and effortlessly rolls with the ebbs and flows of living. It may be that Claire represents how we'd all like to look at life -- as an experience full of sadness, joy, awkward moments, anger, and frustration; and that that's okay. People today get so caught up in the detours of life that we forget to stop and realize how much awesomeness there is all around us. On top of that, instead of ignoring our own inevitable mortality isn't it a lot more beneficial to embrace the fact that we only have a limited amount of time left to be alive? Though there is a looming sadness at the prospect that we are all going to die, the joy that can be extracted from every moment between now and then is magnified tenfold and we learn how to appreciate all of life's little subtleties all the more clearly. The solution is easy. Do what your heart feels, take a road trip and see the world, be reckless, make mistakes, apologize when you have to, face your fears, and never regret anything. Regrets in all of their hideous glory form parts of the tapestry of your life and while up close they serve not but to make you feel ashamed; like Elizabethtown is a movie, the moment you step back and take it all in as a chaotic but unified whole may just me the moment you remember what it's like to live and to have lived. Besides, if it wasn't this it would be something else.
The most successful aspect of Elizabethtown is its overall tone. The film is dripping with the warmness of family and friends, the texture of the Southern States, the beautiful calamity of being lost in life and connecting with someone on a deep level, and the joy of being alive. Like almost every aspect of this movie, the tone succeeds despite itself. Elizabethtown begins as a bleak look into a man with nothing to lose's life. From here it feels like it does not know whether it intends to be dark comedy, slice-of-life storytelling, over-the-top pastiche, heartwarming, or revelatory. Despite this schizophrenia, the film again mashes into a wonderful canvas of emotion and confusion that while perhaps not narratively effective hearkens to a truly analogous version of how life can sometimes feel. This is all a fancy way of saying that I don't necessarily know why Elizabethtown resonates so resoundingly with me, but it certainly does. The movie is only helped by one of the most appropriate and effective soundtracks since Garden State. Seriously, go buy (download) it and take a drive somewhere. Beautiful.
The most charming thing Elizabethtown does is remain unendingly positive. It shows that even in the face of something as terrible as the death of a loved one, the ability to come together with the people you love and who love you is more powerful than any tragedy. And this is true both in life and this film. A family is a thing that surrounds you when you're hurt, and even though it can't necessarily heal you it allows you to be safe and deal with it all safe from the pressures of real life. It is paramount to what a family is in the first place that such safety can be found. A family is essentially a group of people who accept you on some level no matter what because you are part of them on a deeply personal (and sometimes biological) level. But just because some of the regular complications of human interaction are foregone does not mean that a family is any more personally together than anyone else. Instead it's a group of people bound together all of whom are trying their best to figure life out under the shared mandate of understanding each other. It's not always pretty and it doesn't always work, but the most rewarding thing to do sometimes is just bask in the chaos of it all and experience life together.
That's the last lesson to be gleaned from Elizabethtown; that being alive is easy, but that sometimes living is the hardest thing to do. This is why despite the fact that Claire seems oddly well-adjusted and above life's rigors, the viewer is drawn to someone who so fully and effortlessly rolls with the ebbs and flows of living. It may be that Claire represents how we'd all like to look at life -- as an experience full of sadness, joy, awkward moments, anger, and frustration; and that that's okay. People today get so caught up in the detours of life that we forget to stop and realize how much awesomeness there is all around us. On top of that, instead of ignoring our own inevitable mortality isn't it a lot more beneficial to embrace the fact that we only have a limited amount of time left to be alive? Though there is a looming sadness at the prospect that we are all going to die, the joy that can be extracted from every moment between now and then is magnified tenfold and we learn how to appreciate all of life's little subtleties all the more clearly. The solution is easy. Do what your heart feels, take a road trip and see the world, be reckless, make mistakes, apologize when you have to, face your fears, and never regret anything. Regrets in all of their hideous glory form parts of the tapestry of your life and while up close they serve not but to make you feel ashamed; like Elizabethtown is a movie, the moment you step back and take it all in as a chaotic but unified whole may just me the moment you remember what it's like to live and to have lived. Besides, if it wasn't this it would be something else.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
28 x 28: February Twenty-Eight
Haha, ah, the elusive twenty-eighth post. I'm going to go ahead and disclaim the fact that yes, the date above this entry will read 2/28/2010, but it is being written on the twelfth of March.
So it's been a couple of weeks and I really don't know what I originally planned to write in this final entry. I know I have a post it note list that I wrote with some ideas for this entry, so we'll go with that. Other than that, I reckon I'll be winging it.
February 28th was my birthday. For me, my birthday is more of a milestone than the New Year. A birthday is kind of like the personal new year. You get to look forward to what the next three hundred and sixty five days of your life will bring while at the same time looking back and taking stock of what happened in the last. When I look back at age twenty-three, I think that if nothing else it was a transitive year. The proverbial arc of the so-called story of my twenty-third year was quite interesting. It began at a relatively middle ground and then, as life tends to do, the floor dropped out. The rest of the year was kind of a roller-coaster of realizations, discoveries, and reacquaintance with myself. It was one of those years I imagine many people have where your perceptions about things are changed from both your experiences and new and radical thoughts. When I look back at how it was to be twenty-three I imagine I won't be too fond of the time spent, but I can pretty honestly say it was well worth it.
That being said, I decided a while ago that twenty-four should be a much more forward-moving year. In this interest, I compiled a list of things I want to accomplish before I turn twenty-five. Some of these things are pretty far reaching and, quite frankly, terrifying. Some of these are pretty easy. All in all, I think most of them are doable in the span of a year. I'll attempt to keep some kind of update going over the course of the year as to which of these tasks I'm working towards, but in an archival sense I am writing them here to have some proof in a year of either my success or failure.
List:
1. Go-Karts. Never done it. I'm a bad human being.
2. Sky dive. Scares the daylights out of me... Can't be that bad.
3. Bungee jump or go to a bungee park. My nerves already tremble.
4. Try out (audition, in the industry) for a play.
5. Learn to play the guitar I have.
5a. Play out somewhere at least once.
6. Travel outside of the country. More and more plausible by the day.
6a. Maybe study abroad in Australia or the UK.
7. Paint a painting.
8. Win something.
9. Take a road trip around the country. Preferably west.
10. Camp at a National Park. Maybe Yellowstone.
11. Write/draw a comic book.
12. Sculpt a statue or statuette. Maybe easy?
13. Get a new computer.
14. Get a new car.
15. Declare a major.
16. Try out a martial art again.
17. Take up my lifelong battle with learning Spanish a little better.
So that's basically the things I really ought to do this year. Life has a funny way of never playing out the way you'd like. A relative recently told me that there is 'life the way you want it to be' and 'life the way it is'. Life is best when you're towing a line halfway between the two. This list is likely the way I want my life to be, and with any luck I'll be as close to it as I can be. That's more or less the most anyone can reasonably ask.
Lastly, here's a picture of me and my good friend Matt arm wrestling. Why? Because this is my blog and I can do what I want! Also, I think it's a neat picture, and if nothing else this article needs a picture.
Note: It may be some time before I get another post up. Waiting to be reasonably inspired enough to put something up. Hopefully before the end of March we'll be in good shape. Stay tuned.
So it's been a couple of weeks and I really don't know what I originally planned to write in this final entry. I know I have a post it note list that I wrote with some ideas for this entry, so we'll go with that. Other than that, I reckon I'll be winging it.
February 28th was my birthday. For me, my birthday is more of a milestone than the New Year. A birthday is kind of like the personal new year. You get to look forward to what the next three hundred and sixty five days of your life will bring while at the same time looking back and taking stock of what happened in the last. When I look back at age twenty-three, I think that if nothing else it was a transitive year. The proverbial arc of the so-called story of my twenty-third year was quite interesting. It began at a relatively middle ground and then, as life tends to do, the floor dropped out. The rest of the year was kind of a roller-coaster of realizations, discoveries, and reacquaintance with myself. It was one of those years I imagine many people have where your perceptions about things are changed from both your experiences and new and radical thoughts. When I look back at how it was to be twenty-three I imagine I won't be too fond of the time spent, but I can pretty honestly say it was well worth it.
That being said, I decided a while ago that twenty-four should be a much more forward-moving year. In this interest, I compiled a list of things I want to accomplish before I turn twenty-five. Some of these things are pretty far reaching and, quite frankly, terrifying. Some of these are pretty easy. All in all, I think most of them are doable in the span of a year. I'll attempt to keep some kind of update going over the course of the year as to which of these tasks I'm working towards, but in an archival sense I am writing them here to have some proof in a year of either my success or failure.
List:
1. Go-Karts. Never done it. I'm a bad human being.
2. Sky dive. Scares the daylights out of me... Can't be that bad.
3. Bungee jump or go to a bungee park. My nerves already tremble.
4. Try out (audition, in the industry) for a play.
5. Learn to play the guitar I have.
5a. Play out somewhere at least once.
6. Travel outside of the country. More and more plausible by the day.
6a. Maybe study abroad in Australia or the UK.
7. Paint a painting.
8. Win something.
9. Take a road trip around the country. Preferably west.
10. Camp at a National Park. Maybe Yellowstone.
11. Write/draw a comic book.
12. Sculpt a statue or statuette. Maybe easy?
13. Get a new computer.
14. Get a new car.
15. Declare a major.
16. Try out a martial art again.
17. Take up my lifelong battle with learning Spanish a little better.
So that's basically the things I really ought to do this year. Life has a funny way of never playing out the way you'd like. A relative recently told me that there is 'life the way you want it to be' and 'life the way it is'. Life is best when you're towing a line halfway between the two. This list is likely the way I want my life to be, and with any luck I'll be as close to it as I can be. That's more or less the most anyone can reasonably ask.
Lastly, here's a picture of me and my good friend Matt arm wrestling. Why? Because this is my blog and I can do what I want! Also, I think it's a neat picture, and if nothing else this article needs a picture.
Note: It may be some time before I get another post up. Waiting to be reasonably inspired enough to put something up. Hopefully before the end of March we'll be in good shape. Stay tuned.
Friday, February 19, 2010
28 x 28: February Nineteen
"They weren't pictures of people. They were pictures of the way I felt." -- Ted Croner
Sometimes life throws such oddly resonant and serendipitous moments at you that you don't even see them coming. Tonight I had the pleasure of attending the Milwaukee Art Museum's Street Seen exhibit. This was a special event with (loud) music, drinks, food, and various other activities throughout the art museum. It's a regular event called MAM: After Dark. To say the least, it was a fairly schizophrenic affair filled with tons of people and not a particularly clear notion on what it was one should be doing. From an interesting if not bizarre interpretive dance group to craft tables with no discernible purpose, one wouldn't be blamed for finding it hard to find the tone of the night. The sheer amount of people present in a relatively small space and the fact that we arrived slightly later to the venue than normal only exacerbated the calamity. Of course, if one were to just relax and take a step back, it's quite easy to see that the most logical thing to do in an art museum is view art. This was my first visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum, so I was not entirely sure what to expect in terms of what I would see. Part of me has always assumed that art museums are just places where oddities and simplistic renderings get passed off for a lot more than they actually happen to be. I tried my best to keep this notion in check as we decided to see the centerpiece attraction for tonight's event: Street Seen.
Street Seen is a collection of photographs from six different photographers showcasing various pieces demonstrating city life and culture during the years following the Second World War. Photography is one of those art forms that I find it hard to denote any one photograph as art. By dint of what it is, I feel like the classification of such work falls squarely into a subjective category. Regardless, I viewed the exhibit with as open a mind as I am able, and I must say I was quite taken aback. While every four or five pictures simply seemed to me to be pleasant accidents touted as much more, there were some every now and then that struck me as simply amazing. I suppose I should clarify that 'pleasant accident' can both be a good thing and a bad thing. Photography is capturing a moment the way you're seeing or experiencing it, and because moments are fleeting most of the best pictures that will ever be captured will be accidental. The very same photos I was so astonished by were most likely also completely random; a cosmic conflux of elements all coming together at once with a lucky human being aware enough to snap a shutter at the right moment. Happy enough to be wrong about the content of an art museum (for the most part), I plodded along silently critiquing or envying each photo until I came upon the works of one Ted Croner.
The photographs of Ted Croner and the accompanying information about the photographer gripped me in a way I had not expected -- which is to say this is the resonance and serendipity I was speaking about at the beginning of this writing. Ted Croner, upon returning from the War, dedicated himself to being a photographer and took up shop in the heart of the country; New York City. Enrolled at a famous photography institute of the time (a name which escapes me at the moment), it wasn't until one night when Croner borrowed a specific camera (twin reflex, I think) and set out to take a few shots at a diner that he discovered his photographic 'voice'. Upon this discovery Croner commented that he wasn't just capturing people doing things, he was capturing how he felt. I've quoted the exact line at the top of this posting, but those of you who have read this blog for some amount of time may remember that my own view of the world and taking pictures of it is something freakishly similar to Ted Croner. It wasn't until I further discovered that the photographer also relished the post production aspects of his craft that I was very nearly floored. Apparently Croner was a huge fan of experimental manipulation techniques during the development of his work. Altering shadow darkness, exposing negatives longer, double printing negative on the same sheet -- Ted Croner was essentially doing exactly what I was DECADES before I ever thought of the idea. Needless to say, his photographs were the absolute highlight of the entire night for me. Here was a person who not only lived in an era that I personally find exponentially more visually entertaining, but he was much more skillfully and confidently capturing images that I so far only dream to aspire to.
I suppose the point of all of this rambling on and on about finding a kindred spirit in a medium I am growing progressively more fond of is that sometimes it's nice to know that something you believe in is not only shared, but respected. In one fell swoop, the photographs of Ted Croner at once stoked an inspirational fire that has not been so driven in quite a while and also bolstered my personal confidence in my approach to the art form. Life can be a surprising journey from time to time, and it's little moments like the one tonight that can draw the focus on something much bigger you were never aware of. It's hard to accurately describe the kind of feeling such a moment creates, but it's one worth writing about and it's one that I would encourage everyone to go out and find.
Also, I have to again apologize for yesterday's entry. Yikes. Nine more days!
Sometimes life throws such oddly resonant and serendipitous moments at you that you don't even see them coming. Tonight I had the pleasure of attending the Milwaukee Art Museum's Street Seen exhibit. This was a special event with (loud) music, drinks, food, and various other activities throughout the art museum. It's a regular event called MAM: After Dark. To say the least, it was a fairly schizophrenic affair filled with tons of people and not a particularly clear notion on what it was one should be doing. From an interesting if not bizarre interpretive dance group to craft tables with no discernible purpose, one wouldn't be blamed for finding it hard to find the tone of the night. The sheer amount of people present in a relatively small space and the fact that we arrived slightly later to the venue than normal only exacerbated the calamity. Of course, if one were to just relax and take a step back, it's quite easy to see that the most logical thing to do in an art museum is view art. This was my first visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum, so I was not entirely sure what to expect in terms of what I would see. Part of me has always assumed that art museums are just places where oddities and simplistic renderings get passed off for a lot more than they actually happen to be. I tried my best to keep this notion in check as we decided to see the centerpiece attraction for tonight's event: Street Seen.
Street Seen is a collection of photographs from six different photographers showcasing various pieces demonstrating city life and culture during the years following the Second World War. Photography is one of those art forms that I find it hard to denote any one photograph as art. By dint of what it is, I feel like the classification of such work falls squarely into a subjective category. Regardless, I viewed the exhibit with as open a mind as I am able, and I must say I was quite taken aback. While every four or five pictures simply seemed to me to be pleasant accidents touted as much more, there were some every now and then that struck me as simply amazing. I suppose I should clarify that 'pleasant accident' can both be a good thing and a bad thing. Photography is capturing a moment the way you're seeing or experiencing it, and because moments are fleeting most of the best pictures that will ever be captured will be accidental. The very same photos I was so astonished by were most likely also completely random; a cosmic conflux of elements all coming together at once with a lucky human being aware enough to snap a shutter at the right moment. Happy enough to be wrong about the content of an art museum (for the most part), I plodded along silently critiquing or envying each photo until I came upon the works of one Ted Croner.
The photographs of Ted Croner and the accompanying information about the photographer gripped me in a way I had not expected -- which is to say this is the resonance and serendipity I was speaking about at the beginning of this writing. Ted Croner, upon returning from the War, dedicated himself to being a photographer and took up shop in the heart of the country; New York City. Enrolled at a famous photography institute of the time (a name which escapes me at the moment), it wasn't until one night when Croner borrowed a specific camera (twin reflex, I think) and set out to take a few shots at a diner that he discovered his photographic 'voice'. Upon this discovery Croner commented that he wasn't just capturing people doing things, he was capturing how he felt. I've quoted the exact line at the top of this posting, but those of you who have read this blog for some amount of time may remember that my own view of the world and taking pictures of it is something freakishly similar to Ted Croner. It wasn't until I further discovered that the photographer also relished the post production aspects of his craft that I was very nearly floored. Apparently Croner was a huge fan of experimental manipulation techniques during the development of his work. Altering shadow darkness, exposing negatives longer, double printing negative on the same sheet -- Ted Croner was essentially doing exactly what I was DECADES before I ever thought of the idea. Needless to say, his photographs were the absolute highlight of the entire night for me. Here was a person who not only lived in an era that I personally find exponentially more visually entertaining, but he was much more skillfully and confidently capturing images that I so far only dream to aspire to.
I suppose the point of all of this rambling on and on about finding a kindred spirit in a medium I am growing progressively more fond of is that sometimes it's nice to know that something you believe in is not only shared, but respected. In one fell swoop, the photographs of Ted Croner at once stoked an inspirational fire that has not been so driven in quite a while and also bolstered my personal confidence in my approach to the art form. Life can be a surprising journey from time to time, and it's little moments like the one tonight that can draw the focus on something much bigger you were never aware of. It's hard to accurately describe the kind of feeling such a moment creates, but it's one worth writing about and it's one that I would encourage everyone to go out and find.
Also, I have to again apologize for yesterday's entry. Yikes. Nine more days!
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Why We Eat the Holidays.
It's the holidays again and, for me at least, that means an excessive amount of opportunities to eat. Why is that I wonder? Firstly, I imagine that having Thanksgiving lead into a whole month of Christmas frenzy can only promote festive treats and festive meals of colorful cookies and candies. Secondly, and this point may indeed only apply to those of us living in the frozen North, winter is not the most friendly time to be going outside and partaking in various tangents. At the very least it becomes that much tougher to convince oneself to get up and go outside instead of just staying in, having a cookie or six, and watching an old movie. Food is such a fascinating social element in human interaction. Simply speaking we eat to give ourselves energy to keep living, but it's not hard to see that food and the consumption thereof has a much greater significance in the lives of almost everyone on the planet. We eat on a first date; we eat when we get together with family; we eat at work to celebrate nondenominational holidays; we eat when we're happy and sad; we even eat when we have nothing better to do -- people eat for so many reasons and factors that the idea transcends the act.
An average human being eats over one thousand pounds of food in a year. On the basic level, our bodies urge us to do this for 'building blocks' needed to grow and repair our bodies and for fuel to give us the energy to go about our business and eat more. But is this the reason we eat, and if so why then do we eat more during the holidays? Some have suggested that many times we eat in a 'zone' of 'biological indifference' wherein we are neither hungry nor sated. The next time you sit down to eat, examine if you're legitimately in need of sustenance or if indeed you are responding to environmental cues. "Environmental cues," you ask? These can be any number of things ranging from the company with which you dine to emotional state and even - surprise, surprise - the time of year (more appropriately categorized as 'social circumstance').
The holiday season in particular fires on all three of the aforementioned cylinders of the eating engine. Obviously during the holidays family is in town, old friends come home, and as previously mentioned there are an abundance of treats and sugars to ingest. If we meet with a group of friends at an acceptable social gathering place like a restaurant, the stigma falls to us that we are required to eat. We do so in most cases without even being aware of what it is we're eating or if we even need it. The very nature of the holiday season can evoke the emotional triggers that cause a flux in eating patterns. From experience the string of seasonal merriment can affect a range of emotions from bliss to absolute melancholy. Being such a staple of our day-to-day stimuli, eating easily becomes a safely habitual haven for those of us overcome by either end of the spectrum of feeling. Our emotional state and the amount and types of food we eat are so closely tied together largely because of a closeness in the experience of existing. In essence we eat to stay alive and we experience emotion because we live. The conflux of the two activities, while seemingly unrelated at first glance, inevitably becomes much more apparent given the greater complexities at work in our minds and lives on a continuing basis.
In most of ones life, eating is never such a pervasive topic in a normal day of thinking, but that is not to say it is not prominent in our thoughts. It is prominent but in an almost subconscious way. It is such a primal instinct that it bleeds through to the more actively engaged impulses in the course of a day. Simply because of this fact eating and, by extension, food affect and in turn are effected by almost every stimuli we encounter be it internal or externally prompted. These reasons are chief among the factors that make topics such as weight-loss and healthy diets so frustrating to corral. While it is easy to assign logic to how we should relate to food; the biological tangle of stigmas, environmental cues, and ingrained behaviors make it a much more complex topic.
So why are the holidays usually such a catalyst for us to partake in consumption? I think it comes down to a perfect storm of stimuli. Christmas time has a way of throwing everything that makes the act of eating part of our daily lives at us in greatly exaggerated amounts. To me, the increased frequency of eating indicates that we are indeed alive and living. If this is the case, it means that things could be worse and maybe we should all be looking forward to a new year and a chance to experience everything life has to offer while we have the opportunity.
Would you believe I write outlines for these kinds of posts?
An average human being eats over one thousand pounds of food in a year. On the basic level, our bodies urge us to do this for 'building blocks' needed to grow and repair our bodies and for fuel to give us the energy to go about our business and eat more. But is this the reason we eat, and if so why then do we eat more during the holidays? Some have suggested that many times we eat in a 'zone' of 'biological indifference' wherein we are neither hungry nor sated. The next time you sit down to eat, examine if you're legitimately in need of sustenance or if indeed you are responding to environmental cues. "Environmental cues," you ask? These can be any number of things ranging from the company with which you dine to emotional state and even - surprise, surprise - the time of year (more appropriately categorized as 'social circumstance').
The holiday season in particular fires on all three of the aforementioned cylinders of the eating engine. Obviously during the holidays family is in town, old friends come home, and as previously mentioned there are an abundance of treats and sugars to ingest. If we meet with a group of friends at an acceptable social gathering place like a restaurant, the stigma falls to us that we are required to eat. We do so in most cases without even being aware of what it is we're eating or if we even need it. The very nature of the holiday season can evoke the emotional triggers that cause a flux in eating patterns. From experience the string of seasonal merriment can affect a range of emotions from bliss to absolute melancholy. Being such a staple of our day-to-day stimuli, eating easily becomes a safely habitual haven for those of us overcome by either end of the spectrum of feeling. Our emotional state and the amount and types of food we eat are so closely tied together largely because of a closeness in the experience of existing. In essence we eat to stay alive and we experience emotion because we live. The conflux of the two activities, while seemingly unrelated at first glance, inevitably becomes much more apparent given the greater complexities at work in our minds and lives on a continuing basis.
In most of ones life, eating is never such a pervasive topic in a normal day of thinking, but that is not to say it is not prominent in our thoughts. It is prominent but in an almost subconscious way. It is such a primal instinct that it bleeds through to the more actively engaged impulses in the course of a day. Simply because of this fact eating and, by extension, food affect and in turn are effected by almost every stimuli we encounter be it internal or externally prompted. These reasons are chief among the factors that make topics such as weight-loss and healthy diets so frustrating to corral. While it is easy to assign logic to how we should relate to food; the biological tangle of stigmas, environmental cues, and ingrained behaviors make it a much more complex topic.
So why are the holidays usually such a catalyst for us to partake in consumption? I think it comes down to a perfect storm of stimuli. Christmas time has a way of throwing everything that makes the act of eating part of our daily lives at us in greatly exaggerated amounts. To me, the increased frequency of eating indicates that we are indeed alive and living. If this is the case, it means that things could be worse and maybe we should all be looking forward to a new year and a chance to experience everything life has to offer while we have the opportunity.
Would you believe I write outlines for these kinds of posts?
Monday, November 2, 2009
Philosophy: John Cusack Explains It All
I was watching a John Cusack movie the other day, and like a lot of John Cusack movies it also costarred Joan Cusack. Seriously, I get they're related but she's scary looking. I digress though. Like many John Cusack movies, Martian Child has scenes of the actor waxing philosophical about life and how it works. In this particular movie is a scene in which John is speaking to his adopted son about his problem with thinking that he is a Martian. The means in which he uses to convince his son to stop thinking he's an extra-terrestial struck me as pretty heady for a six year old boy, but it got me thinking. It's very poetic so in the interest of not mucking it up with my paraphrasing I'm just going to post up the word-for-word:
In the context of the movie it works very well. Personally, I feel like it speaks to a much more intrinsic and basic understanding of the human condition - a topic I have been increasingly interested in over the last few months. The thing I like most about the above speech though is that it does not offer any answers. It's content to simply lay it out how it is. In a universe in which our existence very well may be a product of random chance, we as humans do things everyday that in the most basic rational sense do not coalesce with the enormity of the circumstances of our actuality. The implications of this thought process caused me to put in context a lot of the things in life that we may take for granted.
First among the many thoughts that I had was the idea of 'growing up' - something that from a young age we are aware that we will do, but never get a clear idea on how to make happen. I'm speaking here about the figurative growing up, and not the literal aging and growing we do as part of being alive. So what is 'growing up', really? In the grand scheme of things it's really only a perfunctory title we apply to ourselves to reassure us that we're living life correctly. Of course this doesn't mean that 'growing up' in a greater, more philosophical sense is not important. Maybe assigning titles and stages to our lives give context to the greater complexities that comprise our being here. In other words we assign greater purpose to our own lives in order to further allow ourselves an existential pivot point in which the rest of our lives settle around. This all flirts dangerously close with the 'meaning of life' discussion; something I don't find myself capable or qualified to even attempt to tackle. Instead what I am trying to say is that in our quest to discover the meaning of existing (something I believe is essential to the natural progression of all human life and its fancy higher brain function) we set rational parameters to what amounts to an otherwise irrational circumstance. I'm aware that this may come off as a slightly bleak outlook on things, but it's simply my attempt to pull back the ordinary focus on things to take a look at the bigger picture.
So let's analyze what growing up entails. On the surface, it's the taking up of greater responsibilities both on ourselves as well as those around us. Logically this opens us up to all kinds of opportunities to cause harm to ourselves, or at the very least make us more vulnerable to both emotional and sometimes physical aggressors. At basic face value these risks we take are completely unnecessary, yet in the greater definition of our lives established over hundreds of years of civilization, the risks are entirely inevitable. Essentially in order to satisfyingly justify our lives, we put ourselves out there against all rationality and leave ourselves vulnerable to harms and sensitivities that, outside of a realistic world, we'd be foolish to allow. But life is one which risk can often yield great reward, and perhaps it is the promise of such rewards that make all the so-called pain of living worthwhile. What is life without experience, and in the context of an existence that is weirder than many ever slow down to take note, is the rite of growing up a means to enrich oneself with said experience?
It's hard sometimes when you're in the moment to contextualize the reasoning behind many of the experiences a person will encounter in life - be it death, heartbreak, sadness, apathy, or sometimes even joy. A lot of the time our minds may never be able to fully comprehend the effects of these things, for many of them are only byproducts of actions and chances we've taken simply for the sake of it. It would be a mistake though to look at life through a primarily singular vision. Though we experience life almost exactly this way, the brunt of the human condition is communal. Just like life and living it are sometimes counter intuitive to the cosmic logic of existing, reaching out to others is very similar. Attachment in and of itself goes against the very nature of singular experience, but we do it anyways. Perhaps it is to justify our own actions. The approval or condolence of the fellow kind may in fact be the closest we ever get to justifying our existence. By the same token, to have another disapprove of our existence on however minuscule a level may in fact be the greatest harm we could expose ourselves to suffer.
So why do we do it? In the depressing, bleak philosophical view of life (one which I have never been a fan) life should be about staying alive from day to day and doing that which best serves yourself. There are a lot of people who do this very thing; sometimes in an insular way, and sometimes in a way that serves themselves through the manipulation of people around them. And who's to say that this method is wrong? In the greater picture it is certainly a more logical way of handling attachment and self-preservation. In the end, we live and we experience because life is too weird not to. We're all going to be okay because life will always adjust. All we have to do is figure out what we want to do when it does. Like John Cusack said, we're all just molecules roughly hewn together spinning around a universe chasing its own tail and in the end isn't that profound enough to justify almost anything we do with the time we have?
Dennis, can I just say one last thing about Mars? - which may be strange coming from a Science-Fiction writer - But right now, you and me here, put together entirely of atoms, sitting on this round rock with a core of liquid iron, held down by this force that seems to trouble you, called gravity, all the while spinning around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour and whizzing through the milkyway at 600,000 miles an hour in a universe that very well may be chasing its own tail at the speed of light; And amidst all this frantic activity, fully cognisant of our own eminent demise - which is our own pretty way of saying we all know we're gonna die - We reach out to one another. Sometimes for the sake of vanity, sometimes for reasons you're not old enough to understand yet, but a lot of the time we just reach out and expect nothing in return. Isn't that strange? Isn't that weird? Isn't that weird enough? The heck do ya need to be from Mars for?
In the context of the movie it works very well. Personally, I feel like it speaks to a much more intrinsic and basic understanding of the human condition - a topic I have been increasingly interested in over the last few months. The thing I like most about the above speech though is that it does not offer any answers. It's content to simply lay it out how it is. In a universe in which our existence very well may be a product of random chance, we as humans do things everyday that in the most basic rational sense do not coalesce with the enormity of the circumstances of our actuality. The implications of this thought process caused me to put in context a lot of the things in life that we may take for granted.
First among the many thoughts that I had was the idea of 'growing up' - something that from a young age we are aware that we will do, but never get a clear idea on how to make happen. I'm speaking here about the figurative growing up, and not the literal aging and growing we do as part of being alive. So what is 'growing up', really? In the grand scheme of things it's really only a perfunctory title we apply to ourselves to reassure us that we're living life correctly. Of course this doesn't mean that 'growing up' in a greater, more philosophical sense is not important. Maybe assigning titles and stages to our lives give context to the greater complexities that comprise our being here. In other words we assign greater purpose to our own lives in order to further allow ourselves an existential pivot point in which the rest of our lives settle around. This all flirts dangerously close with the 'meaning of life' discussion; something I don't find myself capable or qualified to even attempt to tackle. Instead what I am trying to say is that in our quest to discover the meaning of existing (something I believe is essential to the natural progression of all human life and its fancy higher brain function) we set rational parameters to what amounts to an otherwise irrational circumstance. I'm aware that this may come off as a slightly bleak outlook on things, but it's simply my attempt to pull back the ordinary focus on things to take a look at the bigger picture.
So let's analyze what growing up entails. On the surface, it's the taking up of greater responsibilities both on ourselves as well as those around us. Logically this opens us up to all kinds of opportunities to cause harm to ourselves, or at the very least make us more vulnerable to both emotional and sometimes physical aggressors. At basic face value these risks we take are completely unnecessary, yet in the greater definition of our lives established over hundreds of years of civilization, the risks are entirely inevitable. Essentially in order to satisfyingly justify our lives, we put ourselves out there against all rationality and leave ourselves vulnerable to harms and sensitivities that, outside of a realistic world, we'd be foolish to allow. But life is one which risk can often yield great reward, and perhaps it is the promise of such rewards that make all the so-called pain of living worthwhile. What is life without experience, and in the context of an existence that is weirder than many ever slow down to take note, is the rite of growing up a means to enrich oneself with said experience?
It's hard sometimes when you're in the moment to contextualize the reasoning behind many of the experiences a person will encounter in life - be it death, heartbreak, sadness, apathy, or sometimes even joy. A lot of the time our minds may never be able to fully comprehend the effects of these things, for many of them are only byproducts of actions and chances we've taken simply for the sake of it. It would be a mistake though to look at life through a primarily singular vision. Though we experience life almost exactly this way, the brunt of the human condition is communal. Just like life and living it are sometimes counter intuitive to the cosmic logic of existing, reaching out to others is very similar. Attachment in and of itself goes against the very nature of singular experience, but we do it anyways. Perhaps it is to justify our own actions. The approval or condolence of the fellow kind may in fact be the closest we ever get to justifying our existence. By the same token, to have another disapprove of our existence on however minuscule a level may in fact be the greatest harm we could expose ourselves to suffer.
So why do we do it? In the depressing, bleak philosophical view of life (one which I have never been a fan) life should be about staying alive from day to day and doing that which best serves yourself. There are a lot of people who do this very thing; sometimes in an insular way, and sometimes in a way that serves themselves through the manipulation of people around them. And who's to say that this method is wrong? In the greater picture it is certainly a more logical way of handling attachment and self-preservation. In the end, we live and we experience because life is too weird not to. We're all going to be okay because life will always adjust. All we have to do is figure out what we want to do when it does. Like John Cusack said, we're all just molecules roughly hewn together spinning around a universe chasing its own tail and in the end isn't that profound enough to justify almost anything we do with the time we have?
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