We Are Who We Choose To Be

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go."

- T.S. Elliot

Every day I see people. People whose shoulders are slumped, eyes dulled. Trapped in a hurricane of excuses; whipped by fierce winds of denial, of self-justification, procrastination. They are slowly dying to a thousand tiny wounds born from corners they have cut, lies they have told. Their hopes lay with the future, the lives the want to live will start tomorrow. Or so they tell themselves... 

They are paralyzed from their past failures, existing as hollow shells of what they could be. They occasionally make pathetic attempts to change their lifestyle, attempts whose true purpose is to soothe a guilty conscience. Don't live that way, don't be that asshole. Keep pushing. Break the cycle. Make people look to you, an example of what one can accomplish by refusing to quit. Become a fucking monument to the power of human will.

Every day I see people, and I see their vast untapped potential. Potential being tragically squandered on a daily basis. We are who we choose to be.

Choose to be great.

"All I Do Is Win, Win, Win" -- The Illusion Of Control

What happens when a building's foundation crumbles, when it all comes tumbling down? What happens when a person loses that which is most dear to them? The answer is not the ominous monster that it's made out to be. Things simply begin anew. Buildings can be rebuilt and hearts can be reforged - it happens all the time.

We are an incredibly resilient species. Despite our lack of obvious physical defenses (retractable claws, poison venom, night vision, various other badassery, etc) we have survived. Not only against mother nature but against each other as well. We are infused with a raw tenacity that emboldens us to continue standing, defiant to defeat.

But all things must, and will, come to pass. We will eventually stumble, and fall. Far too many seem to mark this as the end, and while that may be true, it is also the beginning. For the most incredible thing is not in our greatest moment of strength, but rather in our most debilitating moment of weakness. When all is lost, we make the choice to start over and try again.

Success and failure are two faces belonging to the same entity, part of the same cycle. I see so many who believe these things act as separate individuals; they do not. They cannot exist without each other and part of obtaining one is acknowledging/accepting the presence of the other. Do not run from loss, and do not dwell in gain.

So know that things will always balance themselves out, always return to equilibrium. The next time you are up, do not fight the inevitable descent. Embrace it as a part of your next rising. The next time you are down, look up and know that you soar again.

Perhaps sooner than you think.

Gotta Know When To Hold Em' And When To Fold Em'

Posted to Facebook on March 12th, 2010.

I'd like start by quoting a friend of mine.

"Sometimes... sometimes I find problems. Other times... other times problems find me."

Though that quote was not the inspiration for this comic, I now realize it fits alongside quite well. This comic, like many others, was drawn in the tumultuous wake of heartbreak. It attempts to describe my feelings of helplessness cast in a more humorous light. I used to turn everything into a joke and take nothing seriously. I used to believe that the best way of dealing with an issue was to find the comedy in it. This comic was a sort of throwback to that behavior.

But maybe it's not such a bad idea. Every once in a while life will throw you a curveball, the kind that you're completely unprepared for. You're gonna strike out, and you're gonna strike out hard. It's something I feel a person must simply accept instead of struggle fruitlessly against. That's the lesson I learned then and have had to keep relearning since.

For a while I tried so hard to actively forget everything that was causing me pain, shut it out through sheer force of will. I was spinning my tires in an uphill battle on an icy slope; the factors of the situation were simply against me. It took a lot of sliding and lost ground to see that it simply wasn't worth the effort, I needed to just relax and wait this storm out.

I suppose that's the final word, which is to calm down and accept things as they are. While it may be on a clock, life is certainly not a race. Do things at your own pace and forget everyone else.

Summer's Farewell Sunset

This was taken a few days ago, at roughly 4:30 pm.

I know I should expect it, but somehow every year the end of fall catches me off guard. The next thing I know the sun is setting before 5 o'clock and it seems to be dark and cold all the time. I'm going to miss those hours of warm daylight during the winter.

But stepping on my porch a few days ago I was treated to an incredible sunset on a relatively warm afternoon. One final hurrah before the last leaves drift from the trees and it's officially coat time all the time.


As an aside, I've always wanted to do time-lapse photography and sights like these are pushing me closer to finally getting around to it. Also: I need that Sony camera that can do panoramic shots because then this picture would've been a lot easier to get.

Show me your (nerd) honor! No your OTHER (nerd) honor!

I figured I should post this one before we got too far past Halloween. Don't worry it's only been like two weeks, I'm sure you're still thinking about costumes a lot.

So there I was at work, casually making my way to the bathroom to relinquish a stream of #1 into a porcelain bowl to liberate my bladder from the tyrannical constraint of the evil fluids lording over it. In order to accomplish this goal I must leave my homeland of “Quality Control” and venture past the outskirts of “Information Technology”. It’s only like a 20 second walk. This is a route I enjoy taking because the IT department is full of cool / funny people that have many personal interests similar to my own because… you know… we’re all nerds. I had not yet discovered the true importance of that word, but I was about to.

You see, it’s Halloween day here at work. Earlier in the day everyone was dressed up in a variety of getups… (Pictures courtesy of some folks at work)

Some ridiculous

Some stupid

And some just plain awesome. 
(Please note there is no wig in this picture, that’s his actual hair)

So naturally some of the office nerds were out and about, running amuck.

 See: nerds running amuck.

But we aren't here to designate superlative costumes, we're here to rediscover what it means to be a "nerd". It was now later in the day and costumes all over the office had disappeared back into the duffle bags from whence they came. However, as with any event of relative stature there were lingering pockets of reminiscence scattered throughout the floor. The corner of the IT department I was passing on my way to the john was no exception. A small spattering of nerds stood conversing in friendly, slightly excited tones

“Slightly” may be a slight understatement

Up til this point, everything was right with the world. Nerdy merriment was rampant with many lulz to be had and I was lazily musing over the best way to kill the next few hours at work. I had slowed my walk and turned to better observe the nerd clump, that’s when one of them said it...

“…yeah but I’m the biggest nerd here!”

That’s about the time shit got real.

All the laughing and joking ceased immediately. All the people he had been talking to became deathly quiet and just stared at him. Some people that had been sitting quietly at their desks, not engaged in the conversation at all, had now craned their necks to throw challenging stares over their cubicle walls.

After all, this now involved them too.

Many people probably didn't even know what was going on but still stared. I mean really, if everyone else in the room is looking at something you're going to join in assuming there's a reason everyone else is. Rubbernecking 101, man.

Even passerbys like myself made and maintained eye contact. We were curious.

Due to a slow-rolling snowball effect, eventually the entire department was boring invisible eye-lasers directly into the offender’s face.

This man had single-handedly garnered the contemptuous attention of everyone this side of the floor, and he'd done it with half a sentence uttered in a few seconds. One thing was apparent: this was serious fucking business and this man had better present some god damn evidence soon or shit was going to get ugly. But true to the nature his supposed title, he didn't react very well to this kind of social pressure, and didn't say a thing.

I found the entire situation to be uncontainably amusing. I just couldn’t get over how it was that phrase that had instantly turned everyone against him. Not some racial slur, not a sexist joke, nothing political, but a modestly cocky proclamation that he had the largest collection of star wars memorabilia in the room. I lol’d. 

No really, I laughed quite loudly and quickly explained why this was so funny. Other people were in obvious agreement when they joined me in a quick chuckle. The situation was soon defused and people were back to their workday. In retrospect, I probably saved that man's nerd honor from what could have easily been a brutal and sacrilegious pillaging. He owes me his life…

…and much more importantly, his precious Jango Fett bobblehead

Surrendering Control -- A Drifty Day

 

A lot of times I don't think like I'm in charge of what I feel, I'm merely reacting to stuff that happens. I dunno, sometimes I just drift.

The system goes a little haywire, enters a more receptive mindset, whatever. In those sorts of moods everything seems to change in an instant, which is pretty unnerving. I mean... when you switch from one vibe to its polar opposite within a matter of minutes, you tend to wonder where you might end up after the chaos is over. Uncertainty is always intimidating.

But this kind of thing isn't always a bad thing. When we spend so much time controlling every aspect of life that we possibly can, it's truly liberating to just let go of the wheel and watch the car drive itself.

Colors of the Earth -- A Moment's Reflection

I look out through the massive full-length windows lining the far wall of my work place, last recalling the sky to be bleak and gray. It is not. Sometime between then and now, the sun has erupted from the clouds that once prevented its warm light from reaching the planet’s surface. The veiled beauty of the flora scattered everywhere has been unmasked, exploding with color luminescent and vibrant.

Proud hues of amber and orange standing starkly against an endless blue. The expanse is dotted with fluffy white giants that gently drift in the same breeze that causes the trees to sway and wiggle, providing a gentle swishing ambiance. Every shift makes magnificent ripples that cascade through the body of shimmering leaves, flashing a slightly different shade than the one before it. The trees outside look alive, animated with color and movement. It makes me think that I’m doing this all wrong – stuck in an office maintaining ephemeral trivialities.

Living a life belonging to the dominant (and very self-involved) species on this planet can cause one to forget their place. A moment like this serves to remind me what the larger picture looks like. That there is so much out there. So many incomprehensible exchanges and transformations - the complexity of nature. We humans marvel at our accomplishments, gloat and swell with pride over feats that in the grand scheme of things are wholly insignificant.

So it feels good to catch glimpses of the infinite machine that drives everything around us. To stand on the precipice of natural ingenuity and marvel at the sheer magnitude of it. It’s like living in a backyard for your entire life and then one day opening the gate to discover that your entire world exists as a miniscule part of something much grander. Mostly because that’s exactly what it is.

We fight and squabble and die over patches of grass in our little backyard. Spend years of precious life toiling away to rise a few ranks in the social system we created to prevent our backyard from destroying itself. Maybe if we get really lucky, we’ll “own” a few more inches of grass than others. Won’t everyone else be jealous then, because just look at all the grass we now have. We have obviously succeeded at life – achievement unlocked. That isn't to say I don't understand the desire for improvement, but I think all too often we’re trading away our lives for phantom feelings of accomplishment. It’s so pointless in my eyes, and sometimes the thought of leaving everything and living outside the bounds of society doesn’t seem so outrageous.

I once heard that evolution is like running as fast as you can just to stay where you are. The implication of that statement is that unless you keep running at full tilt, you will fall behind and perish. That saying can also be applied to human advancement, as we are always striving to outgrow ourselves and push the limits of our capabilities. But really we only seem to change how we play the game, never the game itself.

It seems silly that our fear of stagnation, death, is so great that we devote our lives in a vain attempt to avoid it, all the while being too busy to really live. It reminds me of the Cold War, where both sides continually escalated just to keep the other in check, which in turn caused further escalation. It was a vicious cycle, and in the end all the nukes and all the men couldn’t make the world feel safe again. As I seem to recall the lesson learned from that was “okay seriously let’s not do that again.” Can we not apply that lesson in our personal lives and take a critical look at the rat race we've entered in under the assumption the grand prize is happiness. Have not endless generations before us made that same decision, only to cherish the simplicities and regret the bullshit.

That's why it’s hard to take things so seriously, when so much of what we do is bullshit. Doing something for a task that's part of a list of tasks that you have to complete before the end of the day so that you can stay on track for the week to meet your monthly quotas so that growth is maintained and more money is made so that more stuff can be bought that will make you happy. Layers upon layers of nested bullshit. If that doesn't seem silly at all to you then you'll have to excuse me, Mr. Businessman, while I take a moment to admire the trees outside the window.

That's why I enjoy taking those moments, to stand in the shadows of countless miracles that keep us alive on a day-to-day basis. Basking in the comforting knowledge of their existence, and in the outwardly simple pleasures they allow me. The knowledge that simply by existing, I am a speck of brilliance floating in an inconceivably expansive ocean of specks, all radiant with ingenuity and positively sparking with life. It seems wrong to me that these specks spend so much of their existence fighting tooth and nail over everything when they already have all they require to be happy. In my life so far, none of my best memories involve trophies of our system.

They are things like holding hands and gazing into the eyes of someone I love and trust so intimately I feel we are more like one person than two. Things like spending a timeless evening shouting obscenities at close friends while we mindlessly slay each other in virtual combat without a care in the world. Things like riding down the road with sweet, crisp air filling my lungs as a falling sun warms my face and drapes the rolling hills around me in dramatic shadow. Little things like looking outside to see a veritable wall of shifting color, paralyzed by a true natural beauty living at the heart of a boring office complex. It’s been said before – and for good cause – but it’s all about the simple things.

But as I look back outside, the sun has retreated behind the clouds and the landscape has regained its former gray tint. The dazzling light which acted as a physical metaphor for the luminescence of mind I was just experiencing has faded, and I feel the backyard obscuring the rest of the universe again. It’s time to get back on the treadmill. If I had the courage, I would get up and walk right out of this place. Go somewhere that engaged me and spend the rest of the day there. If I was brave enough I would do that every day, and live life entirely by my own terms.

But not today.

Today I will continue on the path I’ve chosen, resume my ongoing gamble that it will take where I want to go and that I will be fulfilled by the experiences contained within its boundaries. The path is comforting and well-tread which is why, for now, I’ve chosen it. But I am young – barely 21 years old – and the events of tomorrow are always a mystery. Who knows what may happen and change things forever. I guess we’ll see, won’t we? It’s not like I really have a choice.