A 1/4 Century Under My Belt
Originally Written July 17, 2010
Dear Readers,
I felt it was time for another post, since I haven’t written one since I discussed my trip to Bolivia. And in fact I write on the eve of another trip: in a couple of days I’ll be meeting up with my parents in Cuzco.
I write, almost a week after my birthday during which I completed a quarter century of existence. I’m afraid I don’t have any wisdom to part with off the cuff, but that’s going to stop me from writing my piece here.
I celebrated my birthday quietly. Initially I had planned on not telling anyone, since I was afraid the villagers would try to get me drunk. But this birthday seemed like a milestone of some kind, and I wanted to share it with someone. I couldn’t tell Patrick because he had gone to Lima on Peace Corps business, although he’s gone there so often lately that I’m suspecting he’s leading a double life of some kind. So I told Orfelinda, my host mother. She just congratulated me and gave me a hug. I told that cat, too, but the cat didn’t give a damn.
However, Teofilo, my counterpart already knew. It seems I told him a while ago when my birthday was, safe in the knowledge that he’d forget the date. It turns out though, that in this I was a victim of incorrect thought. He summoned me from lunch and insisted that I have a few beers with him, which turned out to be not as painful as I feared because it wasn’t a large group, and also because we were drinking beer and not homebrewed swill that is quite popular up here. I have to admit, I was touched he remembered, since usually my memory is less perfect.
The best part for me though was the messages I got from my friends on the phone. I think connections are probably the best thing there is, despite my not-infrequent need for solitude.
In three months and change I’ll be closing this chapter of my life and moving on to something new. But I don’t know what yet and it causes me a bit of anxiety, at least as far as work goes.
I think I need to make some personal changes though. Much of my life was ruled by anxiety, which led to depression, guilt and low self-esteem. The anxiety isn’t as bad as it used to be, and I overall feel much better than I used to. I’ve had to accept some very real things about myself. For one example, I had to accept the way I work here in the Peace Corps. For the first several months here I was miserable in one shape or another. Then I started doing what I liked and have felt a lot better. Of course, this should seem obvious, but the things that I am interested in aren’t really pertinent to Peace Corps development work. That’s been the source for a lot of guilt for me, but when I started to understand my personality, I started to accept that I can help in other ways, but not the ways it seems it would be expected of a person typically in the role I’m in as a volunteer.
But on a bigger level, aren’t we all playing some role? The role of students, or parents, or friends, or enemies, or the sarcastic person, etc? It’s a notion that I came across and to be honest it hasn’t really sunk in yet.
But to illustrate, the other night I was frustrated because I didn’t know what to believe: I felt I couldn’t believe what I had been taught in my youth because I had been taught it without being able to think about it critically, I just accepted someone else’s views.
And I felt I couldn’t accept what I thought I believed, because it had still been shaped, tainted, if you will, by what others had told me. I couldn’t believe what I wanted to believe because how did I know I wasn’t just trying to emulate someone else and not be myself?
But underneath it all, so subtly, so quiet that it made it’s presence known but without a huge epiphany, there was this stillness, almost like a flatness, and it said to me, not with words, but just in a way I only perceived it, that it was also part of me, and I sensed the message “Who is trying to decide what to believe?” Underneath the noise of thought and feeling, there is still something else.
Now, this is stuff that I’ve been reading a lot about these past two years, so I was more amused than surprised by any of this. I guess it’s also possible that it was implanted in my sub-consciousness. But the more I learn about physics – which incidentally is very little and at a layman’s level – the more science seems to suggest a deeper level of existence…but it through connections to other dimensions (String Theory, which comes to mind because it suggests we inhabit ten dimensions instead of three, although because I know next to nothing about it, I don’t known if it’s germane to what I’m talking about right now), and yoga and meditation all seem to give evidence of a deeper sense of Self that we lose track of.
I think that’s what I need to find now. I think religion aside, or political ideology aside, or any tags or labels, there is one rule: Do know harm. And it perhaps isn’t even a rule to be followed or broken, but just a fact, like gravity. Gravity draws things to the ground, as I understand the law to be. Maybe there is a law in harming things: if you harm something, you aren’t punished so much as you also harm yourself. Looking after your interests is one thing: but being selfish is quite another. After we hurt someone, if we are in synch with our feelings, do we really feel good afterwards?
As far as my guilt complex, my anxiety over actions that I take in life. I don’t have any answers. I suspect that I’m addicted to labels, to needing to tag everything as right or wrong, and this feel guilty about everything. Because it takes a lot of effort for me simply to enjoy myself sometimes, simply to enjoy life, because sometimes I can’t tell if doing is right or wrong. I don’t mean in the sense of right or wrong in, for example, wondering if I should rob a bank or anything dramatic like that. But, to give two examples, I remember that in the very few occasions that I did drink underage, I felt paranoid about it, never able to relax. I remember starting to drive that I never seemed as at ease with it because I felt that if I was even one mile over the speed limit, I was a target for a ticket.
I’ve always valued loyalty to people, never wanting to let them down. And that’s a trait I hope to maintain throughout my life…the loyalty part. Sometimes in life, people are let down. But when I let myself down, I’ve never really learned how to be gentle on myself. I’m such a hard self-judge, even when I don’t want to be, I just don’t know how to turn this switch off.
I am now working focusing on growing past this. There is, I believe an optimistic side to this all: My mind and my body are working to create stress which creates pain that I can feel even as I write this: But instead of feeling like I’m being betrayed by the body I wear, maybe it’s telling me: Alright: now it’s time to move onto the next stage of life, and by understanding this signals correctly, understand that it is a stage where you can better understand that life is a joy.
Hope all is well.
Tristan
Dear Readers,
I felt it was time for another post, since I haven’t written one since I discussed my trip to Bolivia. And in fact I write on the eve of another trip: in a couple of days I’ll be meeting up with my parents in Cuzco.
I write, almost a week after my birthday during which I completed a quarter century of existence. I’m afraid I don’t have any wisdom to part with off the cuff, but that’s going to stop me from writing my piece here.
I celebrated my birthday quietly. Initially I had planned on not telling anyone, since I was afraid the villagers would try to get me drunk. But this birthday seemed like a milestone of some kind, and I wanted to share it with someone. I couldn’t tell Patrick because he had gone to Lima on Peace Corps business, although he’s gone there so often lately that I’m suspecting he’s leading a double life of some kind. So I told Orfelinda, my host mother. She just congratulated me and gave me a hug. I told that cat, too, but the cat didn’t give a damn.
However, Teofilo, my counterpart already knew. It seems I told him a while ago when my birthday was, safe in the knowledge that he’d forget the date. It turns out though, that in this I was a victim of incorrect thought. He summoned me from lunch and insisted that I have a few beers with him, which turned out to be not as painful as I feared because it wasn’t a large group, and also because we were drinking beer and not homebrewed swill that is quite popular up here. I have to admit, I was touched he remembered, since usually my memory is less perfect.
The best part for me though was the messages I got from my friends on the phone. I think connections are probably the best thing there is, despite my not-infrequent need for solitude.
In three months and change I’ll be closing this chapter of my life and moving on to something new. But I don’t know what yet and it causes me a bit of anxiety, at least as far as work goes.
I think I need to make some personal changes though. Much of my life was ruled by anxiety, which led to depression, guilt and low self-esteem. The anxiety isn’t as bad as it used to be, and I overall feel much better than I used to. I’ve had to accept some very real things about myself. For one example, I had to accept the way I work here in the Peace Corps. For the first several months here I was miserable in one shape or another. Then I started doing what I liked and have felt a lot better. Of course, this should seem obvious, but the things that I am interested in aren’t really pertinent to Peace Corps development work. That’s been the source for a lot of guilt for me, but when I started to understand my personality, I started to accept that I can help in other ways, but not the ways it seems it would be expected of a person typically in the role I’m in as a volunteer.
But on a bigger level, aren’t we all playing some role? The role of students, or parents, or friends, or enemies, or the sarcastic person, etc? It’s a notion that I came across and to be honest it hasn’t really sunk in yet.
But to illustrate, the other night I was frustrated because I didn’t know what to believe: I felt I couldn’t believe what I had been taught in my youth because I had been taught it without being able to think about it critically, I just accepted someone else’s views.
And I felt I couldn’t accept what I thought I believed, because it had still been shaped, tainted, if you will, by what others had told me. I couldn’t believe what I wanted to believe because how did I know I wasn’t just trying to emulate someone else and not be myself?
But underneath it all, so subtly, so quiet that it made it’s presence known but without a huge epiphany, there was this stillness, almost like a flatness, and it said to me, not with words, but just in a way I only perceived it, that it was also part of me, and I sensed the message “Who is trying to decide what to believe?” Underneath the noise of thought and feeling, there is still something else.
Now, this is stuff that I’ve been reading a lot about these past two years, so I was more amused than surprised by any of this. I guess it’s also possible that it was implanted in my sub-consciousness. But the more I learn about physics – which incidentally is very little and at a layman’s level – the more science seems to suggest a deeper level of existence…but it through connections to other dimensions (String Theory, which comes to mind because it suggests we inhabit ten dimensions instead of three, although because I know next to nothing about it, I don’t known if it’s germane to what I’m talking about right now), and yoga and meditation all seem to give evidence of a deeper sense of Self that we lose track of.
I think that’s what I need to find now. I think religion aside, or political ideology aside, or any tags or labels, there is one rule: Do know harm. And it perhaps isn’t even a rule to be followed or broken, but just a fact, like gravity. Gravity draws things to the ground, as I understand the law to be. Maybe there is a law in harming things: if you harm something, you aren’t punished so much as you also harm yourself. Looking after your interests is one thing: but being selfish is quite another. After we hurt someone, if we are in synch with our feelings, do we really feel good afterwards?
As far as my guilt complex, my anxiety over actions that I take in life. I don’t have any answers. I suspect that I’m addicted to labels, to needing to tag everything as right or wrong, and this feel guilty about everything. Because it takes a lot of effort for me simply to enjoy myself sometimes, simply to enjoy life, because sometimes I can’t tell if doing is right or wrong. I don’t mean in the sense of right or wrong in, for example, wondering if I should rob a bank or anything dramatic like that. But, to give two examples, I remember that in the very few occasions that I did drink underage, I felt paranoid about it, never able to relax. I remember starting to drive that I never seemed as at ease with it because I felt that if I was even one mile over the speed limit, I was a target for a ticket.
I’ve always valued loyalty to people, never wanting to let them down. And that’s a trait I hope to maintain throughout my life…the loyalty part. Sometimes in life, people are let down. But when I let myself down, I’ve never really learned how to be gentle on myself. I’m such a hard self-judge, even when I don’t want to be, I just don’t know how to turn this switch off.
I am now working focusing on growing past this. There is, I believe an optimistic side to this all: My mind and my body are working to create stress which creates pain that I can feel even as I write this: But instead of feeling like I’m being betrayed by the body I wear, maybe it’s telling me: Alright: now it’s time to move onto the next stage of life, and by understanding this signals correctly, understand that it is a stage where you can better understand that life is a joy.
Hope all is well.
Tristan
posted by Tristan | 2:48 PM
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