Thought it'd be a good idea to crank out a blog entry since I have access to a computer for the moment and I'm all alone. I think I've figured out my "what" even if I have no idea of the "why." My "what" is low self-confidence. I've always wrestled with it; rather, I've always suffered from it and have done my best to ignore it. I'm a dreamer. I get ideas that I think will make me happy, and, for most of my life, I've never been able to follow through. I'd change my mind, or convince myself that whatever it was I wanted wasn't what I wanted after all. My life has been a series of moving from one potential to the next without ever finding any actualization.
Basically, I've quit a lot of things a lot of times.
Some things are worth quitting. I quit smoking a while back. I recently quit eating fast food. I quit basing my worldview on unfounded faith a few years ago. But that's not the sort of quitting to which I refer. Success, so I'm told, comes after many failures, many hardships, many disappointments. I think that's true. I haven't really allowed myself to stay on a path long enough to run into too many of those obstacles. I kept changing direction. I blame my Christian upbringing in part. I blame myself mostly.
I thought I had a cosmic purpose to my life, given to me by the very one who created the cosmos in the beginning. Most Christians take this belief for granted - the idea that the originator of all life, all matter, all everything, cares about tiny specks of dust like us - because their faith becomes routine. Even the grandest and most grandiose of notions become rather pedestrian when repeated often enough. Humans, for all their achievements, are still pretty dense creatures.
When I gave up my Christian faith, I lost that sense of divine purpose and cosmic significance, and I was egotistical enough to not settle for anything less than being a unique snowflake, set apart ("called by God" is the common phrase) for the most significant role a human could possibly have in the universe.
Now, my values have changed. I accept that I'm dust - a series of permutations of star stuff like most everything else - and my significance is what I make of it. Anything more than that is beyond both my knowledge and my control. There is freedom in such an idea. I'm not bound to conform to the cookie-cutter mold most religions embrace and encourage. If I do go that route (as I've seen many so-called "freethinkers" do lately), then I risk forsaking the very liberty I acquired by abandoning faith. I am dust, and my purpose is mine to discover and even create. I'm now okay with that.
I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom." - Fight Club
I wasn't okay with that for a very long time. Now I find my life's meaning in my passions - writing, reading, martial arts, music - and in love. Romantic love has been for me a source of much more pain than joy. I have hope that one day I'll find that kind of love, and it won't turn sour or fade away or have been nothing more than childish infatuation in disguise. I've experienced every one of those kinds of "love." Makes a guy just want to quit altogether. Nonetheless, I'm referring to "love" in a much broader sense: compassion and empathy for those around me, appreciation of friends and family, experiencing new people, making new connections, understanding that we're all connected.
Yeah, I've been a quitter at times. Lack of follow-through, one could say. I've had some reasons that are legit, and other reasons that are just excuses. Regardless, I'm at a point in my life where I want to not quit. I want to see it through. But the question remains: see what through?
This is possibly my favorite Fight Club quote right now. I have been, slowly and methodically, working toward improving myself - physically, mentally, emotionally, even socially. I've been following my diet carefully and consistently, and I have never felt better. I'm exercising more now than ever before. I'm setting goals and achieving them. I don't know what the long-term is, but my plan is to improve myself, get used to setting and reaching goals, and when the time comes to make bigger decisions about life, the universe, and everything, I'll be better equipped to make the right choices.
The "self improvement" to which Tyler Durden refers in the film is the superficial improvement that makes people look like underwear models. It's not wrong per se, but it's a form of masturbation. It's nothing more than self-pleasuring. And that's fine (seriously, kitten do not die when you masturbate), but Tyler's point is, I believe, that real and meaningful improvement comes from destroying ourselves; not literally, but by removing our pretentiousness and our egos and our greed and our self-imposed expectations and our self-image. One must have confidence to achieve goals. How much confidence would I have if I didn't care what people thought... or if I didn't compare myself to other people and think that I don't measure up to everyone else around me... or if I could put my past behind me completely and not let it anchor me down emotionally... or if I could just be myself and ignore all the religions and mysticism that want me to think my existence somehow matters to the rest of the universe.
Tyler Durden is actually a lot like what the Buddha is to Buddhism - a bringer of enlightenment - except he enjoys punching people.
You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else." - Fight Club
