Finding an Answer

Finding an Answer | Thoughts | Moose

So I have spent the last few months, although its more been like a year, really struggling to find what my place is in life, what my role is.

I even wrote a long piece about being creative, and finding a place – more specifically your own role in life rather than being the person that other people want you to be. I still will probably post that at some point, but my mind has really come to this point here.

Just over one year ago, I broke up with a long term girlfriend. For those two years I devoted myself completely to her, and ultimately that          turned me into a very closed individual, scared of meeting new people, scared of pushing my own boundaries, and was the basis for the reason why we broke up. I offered nothing new to her, but more significantly, nothing new to myself. It affected my creativity and my growth as a person, and, as a man who was 22 at the time, it was a very destructive way to live life.

The past year or so has been a struggle to find out who I am inside when I lost the only thing that meant anything to me. I have had to reinvent Charles. However, I would always find myself procrastinating, not following through with my dreams (because I like to jump at ideas that I have, and following that for a short amount of time before jumping straight to the next tangent). I found that I would plan inefficiently, and a big reason for this is that I did not really understand what I wanted from life.

(Before I go on here is a short tangent for you to read…) It’s difficult to know what you want from life in a society today that expects you to be something, expects you to fill a role. We are stuck in a period of time where you can ‘be’ anything you want to, but you are not anything until you are successful. On top of that, there are countless different things that you can be, and it’s hard to focus on just one – no wonder the cases of ADHD are growing.

I truly took and step back and reflected: 

• Where am I now? 
• What do I want to be? 
• Where do I want to be in 10 years? 
• How do I want to live my life?

These are all questions that I asked myself (the above that I mentioned is not an extensive list) that I thought would really help me define my path in the future. And it did, though not in the way I thought it would.

Where am I now? This question was a difficult thing to ask in the sense that you cannot know all of your poor habits, but more than that, it is difficult to reflect on yourself and recognise all that bad aspects of who you are. I am very closed off, and find it very difficult to open myself up to people. I have low confidence that makes me question everything I do. I slouch. I am not happy, borderline depressed at times. I do not challenge myself enough, and often back down when it gets tough.

What do I want to be? Where do I want to be in 10 years? These were the toughest questions, because to look forward that far in your life needs to take into account a number of different factors. You have to ask yourself what you enjoy, and you also need to look at other people as role models for your behaviour, which ultimately means that you will copy some of their traits. And when I really thought about it, I couldn’t come up with an answer; well apart from the usual shit like ‘more assertive’, ‘fit’, ‘funny’, etc. Although I did want to change the world and be a voice. With all the books I have read (‘The Outsider’ by Albert Camus, ‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac, ‘The Topic of Cancer’ by Henry Miller) and the philosophies that I have been exposed to, I have come to the conclusion that I should just live life and not worry about the future. Tomorrow might now come, and we are only guaranteed today, this moment that we are sharing (fully aware that I am glossing over this, but it’s unimportant how I reached that viewpoint). So I asked myself the next question…

How do I want to live my life? I thought about the above philosophy. I thought about what life means to me. I thought about what fun is. And after a lot of time thinking (though always coming up with a similar answer), I came to this conclusion:

I want to live an adventure.

I want to go and a try a ton of different and new things. I started writing out a bucket list of all the things that I want to do, from driving across America (maybe an idea given to me by the aforementioned ‘On the Road’), seeing the sights of Vietnam, live in a hostel, learning to salsa.

And then I had a thought: “that’s not an adventure”. That is planned. Sure, there are things that I want to try, things I want to do, but why am I thinking so much about it. Why not live just go live it? Why not just book tickets to America and go travel (obviously I have to save the money up first). Life does not have a plan for you, for me, for anyone. We will be born, we will live, and we will die – and that is the only thing that we can be sure of in life. Who knows how we will die, or when that point will come. In fact, it could even be argued that life is all about preparing yourself for death, but I’m not going to go there right now…

I will read books and articles that help me learn. I will watch movies that make me think. I will do things that make me laugh. I will talk to as many people as I possibly can to learn from them.

And although none of this will be able to give me a definite answer to the meaning of life, I will have some fucking fun living it. Why am I trying to find an answer in a life that does not have one itself?

One thing is for sure, I do not want to be one of those people that falls into a role in life, in work, and doesn’t enjoy it. I do not want to be that man that works every day in their lives following the same old painful routine, waiting for the weekend to come, and for the day to end.

I’m going to live an adventure.

And I’m going to share it with you – all the troubles I encounter, the old routines that I fall back on, and hopefully, all the fun that I have on the way.

Here’s a lovely thing I read, that I think we should all consider: Eric Idle’s Eulogy about George Harrison. 

Life and Death: An Ultimate Experience and The Complete Adventure

Ideas and Opinions | Moose

So as you can see from Milos post below, I challenged the both of us to add a piece to the blog that is somewhat meaningful to life for us. I purposely left it vague with the intention that we tap into our creative minds, and just let the flow overtake us. To the point that we will be writing about something that the mind is passionate about in that moment.

I want to write about an idea that Miles presented in the most recent podcast about the lottery, where he suggested that you do not experience your birth or death. I am going to offer a different point of view, my opinion:

There are only two things to experience: Life and Death.

In my opinion, we experience our Birth, though we do not have the capacity to remember it or to understand the significance of that first breath of the clean air in the this world, or why we cry in that moment. But we still experience it.

We experience our death, though it is a solitary experience. In fact, in the moment of experiencing it, you are the only person that understands what that moment is like (because everyone who has felt it before is already devoid of life).

And it is this latter point that I want to talk about.

At the risk of this looking like a very depressing piece, I first need to make this one clarification:
'There is no life without death, that is a truth, but more significantly, there is no death without life.'

I will not deny that death is a scary experience. As a man that does not believe in an afterlife, I have before wondered, and been distressed about, what will happen to me when I die - something that is very natural for something as conscious as a human being. For me, it would be the equivalent of turning off the TV. A picture that was once so vibrant is now non-existent - which is probably not the best description that I could give, but it's the way I picture it in my head. And I will admit that it terrified me to some extent.

But then I slowly came to realise that death is just a part of life. That the most important thing to do is to just embrace and live life in a way that you enjoy. We should live life in a way that satisfies us, because reaching that end point having lived a life in which you were not truly expressive of who you are means that you have not truly taken advantage of the magnificent thing that you have been presented with: life.

If it makes us happy to go on walks and feeling the gentle, cold wind brush against our cheeks, and hearing the rustling of the trees in the distance, if that makes us feel alive, then we should live in that way without regrets.

Make sure you live in the way that you want to. Do not dream. Live these experiences.

If we do live this way, then when it does come to the end of our lives, and as we lay on our death bed, we can be satisfied, and live that final adventure of our lives: Our Death.

Though it is the final moment, it does not need to be the least enjoyable.

A part of me looks forward to laying there knowing that I am in my last moments, and looking back on my life at all the successes and failures of my life before drawing in that last breath of life, feeling that soft air collapse on its way down my throat, as my feeling of touch slowly starts to disintegrate, and my body becomes more and more weightless.

In that moment, and not before then, I truly believe that the magnitude of life will become more evident than at any other point since your birth.

Before that moment, though, we have to live.

There is no life without death, and there is no death without life.

Moose.