John and Tom

I stumbled across a speech given by one of my favourite authors/artists, Bill Watterson. His authentic pondering of happiness, politics, philosophy and so much more in Calvin & Hobbes has forever instilled in me a desire to understand what makes a satisfied life.

Bill taught me to focus on the present, to savour the personal moments between best friends, to enjoy the places our minds wander to throughout the day, to take satisfaction in learning, and to create something for ourselves for no other reason than to create. I learned to not look for fulfillment in prestige or in the eyes of others. And that contentment is in the process, not the product.


My favourite part of the speech:

You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.
Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime.

But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED 
Bill Watterson
Kenyon College Commencement
May 20, 1990
 http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html

In Shallow Seas We Sail

I've been confronted by important notions about forgetting recently, which connects to ideas in the novel I read over Christmas that discusses the necessity to forget in order to heal. But it places one in a peculiar situation when you are the one that needs to be forgotten. Or rather, you are the one that has been forgotten.

Our memories are the crux of who we are, how we remember (read: interpret) the past controls who we are in the present. We build upon the structural foundation of the identity we've decided upon (though our options are more like multiple choice questions to the situations we encounter, with the options being the different cultural maps [perspectives] we've been handed, with no real limit to our decisions but the limits we accept). But what happens when the crux of me (of all of us) is meant to be temporary, meant to be malleable for the future (read: present) in order for us to adapt, to cope; destroying, rebuilding, and re-destroying ourselves perpetually.

Why hold onto any past? Because without it we become apathetic and callous to the people around us, to the people who hold onto some piece of us in the vain belief they know the reality of our perceptions and past. We hold onto the past that taught us how to be safe when trouble comes, using our personal maps. Maps that are filled with landmarks and metropolises in a land of fantasy, personal fantasy. None of these places exist, but they tells us what "truth" is. But there's a difference between being able to discuss the civilizations of our past when there are others to confirm the old architecture and the disasters that shattered them in the first place then when confronted with wandering through the wreckage in solitude; a fertile land, turned into a wasteland. Or was it always a wasteland? The present too will become a wasteland. And once we forget it, it will be nothing.

Like us, individuals in a system that specifically needs the individuals it created. But tightly clutching our maps, needing them to feel, but binding us to the ever shifting images on the page. Finding meaning in the forgotten ruins; the ruins that don't exist, which cannot be visited by anyone who wasn't there to see them with us (or who have a completely different picture of the same places). But they need to forget seeing them, they need to look to their own map, while I look at the crumbling piece of paper in front of me.

We will be forgotten, eventually by everyone; until we are the only ones who hold onto a meaningless map, full of directions to treasures that don't exist to anyone else. And only the lucky ones even make it to this stage, when we can see the futility of our maps, the rest die before getting to that point, and are forgotten even sooner. But being remembered has no value. The value is in the temporary landmarks, on the constantly changing landscape. Just because the strings become visible does not change the power they have over us.

This may be incomprehensible garbage, but it too will be forgotten.

I know I've posted this before, but it's relevant.

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them-- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried when you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for the want of a teller but for the want of an understanding ear.
-Stephen king

The Shroud of Shame

As Dan curled himself in fear, the helplessness brought him back to a time, long before, when he had first found out about her illness. All he knew how to do then to was curl up like a helpless child, and this instinct remained. A flood of events rushed through his memory, which, under normal circumstances would have been easily held at bay by pure will.

At first, insignificant moments flashed in his mind, soothing him. Dan remembered how it felt to lie on the couch next to her while she lightly snoozed. A reassuring serenity would cover his anxiety, there were always problems, but they could wait during these moments. Then, when Sarah was ready to reawaken and continue the day she would nuzzle close to his neck and sigh with intense satisfaction. It was his favorite memory. But it was tainted, for it always lead to the next chapter of their story.

Dan had watched her slowly waste away during what others always called "the best years". Her frequent indigestion and stomach related issues were just one of her idiosyncrasies when they had gotten to know each other. She carefully chose what food to cook or which dish to order at restaurants in order to lessen the pains that occurred after. But when her pain worsened he had taken her to a clinic, even against her complaints. An arduous process began involving a plethora of tests and treatments, opinions, second opinions, even third opinions. The diagnosis came back all the same: advanced stomach cancer. Dan had thought of little black submarines deep in her body, destroying it piece by piece. Doctors tried to comfort them, explaining that symptoms don't appear until well after the disease has taken its hold. It had long been too late.

During their last few months together she had begged him to stop looking for new doctors or clinics to see. Dan could not give her up without fighting, every avenue must be explored, hope must never be lost. But his unwavering fervor only caused more damage. Sarah did not want to fight until the last day, she had realized long before that she had to count her life in months left to live. She asked for trips to the coast, or drives to childhood locations. But most of these requests were overridden by Dan's assertion that she was too weak, that she needed to rest for their drive to a clinic in the next province rather than waste her energy. Sarah hated every second of the hospitals and treatment centers, she resented how everyone treated her as a sack of meat with a defect. Dan had never counted it Sarah's way, he had seen it as years left to lose, and his stubbornness had squandered what little was left. But she had clung to him, for if there was one thing she couldn't manage it was to die with them fighting.

A few weeks before she passed they had been in Ontario to see another doctor when their appointment was abruptly cancelled. This time, when Sarah asked for Dan to take her somewhere beautiful, he had no excuses. Sarah had meticulously mapped out a driving route long before, but her plans had been postponed every other trip to Ontario for clinic visits that often left her consciously impaired for subsequent days. But this time they were able to drive through the Catskills mountains south of the US border. It was summer and the scenery was at its greenest, proudly displaying the spring growth. Although Sarah was weak, she had never been happier, finally away from the sterile faces of hospital staff. Their last weeks were dedicated to going where she wanted, old houses, parks she had played on as a child, even her old elementary school. Saying her goodbyes to brick and stone.

Dan's extended fighting had stolen away her opportunity to see what she wanted, replacing it only with denial. And then she had died. One more unrecognized face in the obituary. The grief over whelmed him, and he barely left his rented duplex for weeks. Being absent from work, Dan lost his job. He never told anyone at work about Sarah, always kept to himself, and a few people were glad to see the "short-tempered introvert" go. But to Dan, her memory brought back flashes of the past. He was powerless to fight the flood of emotions that had resurrected, violently displacing the dirt he had buried them with. So he sat, clinging to his shroud of shame.

The Engulfing Darkness

Dan slumps to the back of the glass. The ringing of the quarter clanking into its cradle lingers in the stale telephone booth. Dan slides down, defeated by the pointless repetition that had maintained his focus for an unknown amount of time. Each try a new glimmer of hope, but over time even that had waned. Some times he had listened for the dial tone, patiently expecting some inhuman frequency to help him communicate his desires, his fears, his hope. Other times he screamed, begged, even pleaded with the nothingness on the other end of the line.

But now he has been conquered. His mental capacity to will happiness into existence lays as a rotting corpse, fouling the boxed air. The Machine above him, a gladiatorial champion. He glares up at his foe, seething with contempt for the silent victor. But the phone only stares apathetically back. Dan's hatred brings him to a stand.  His gaze begins to shift around the booth in a clockwise turn. Shapeless black forms taunt Dan from the corner of his darting eyes. He scans the darkness, lit only by a single, dim, light bulb. The growing fear clutches his insides.

The darkness attacks his anxiety. For every degree of vision Dan's eyes could perceive there were hundreds of others he could not, and they tore into his state of mind. At last he buckles and offers himself to the figures he cannot manage to track, but which he is sure will get him. He clutches his knees, rocking in a corner of the desolate booth, waiting upon the inevitable. Each passing second devoured by subsequent ones. But his fears lead nothing but to more wasted time.

End part 3

Comfort in Distraction

Dan continued his asinine ritual for countless cycles. Phone off the hook, quarter in the slot, wait for the metallic ring of the coin to finish, press '0', nothingness, replace receiver, collect coin. The weight of the receiver provided him with comfort, as did the ring of the coin entering and exiting the apparatus.

His thoughts were focused on the concrete at first, the shape and smoothness of the receiver, the clanking change container. But the longer he completed the cycle the less he was able to concentrate merely on the physical actions. The abstract questions threatened to flood his systems, and the ritual had held them at bay, briefly.

For the first time Dan gazed beyond the glass walls encasing the phone booth. On all sides fog hid the landscape behind it. Dan rotated inside box. He could not remember when he arrived at the box or how come he needed to be there.

He stood frozen, with the receiver dangling from his hand. Dan placed the black piece back onto its cradle. The machine trembled as the coin once more appeared in the jutting, curved, slot. He stood as if gazing into headlights, mesmerized by the dull, used quarter. The coin resting in its tiny home prompted him to recall how he had stumbled upon this box.

He remembered opening the door to the phone booth with excitement. He had peered through the glass before, and, despite having nothing on his person, had spied the quarter lying in the change return cradle. What a blessing he had thought, what good luck he had come across!

But as time marched on in its relentless manner, his perspective had changed. The coin, once his savior, now encased him in a loop. Passing seconds grew into minutes, minutes matured into hours. 

The cold, apathetic box had become Dan's home. Not out of necessity or benefit, but out of comfort. His aching insides did not want to forge on, but preferred relief. For as long as this ritual helped momentarily sustain the crumbling dam of consciousness, it was enough.

End of part 2
Another continuation of the story, no lyrical references in this one, though I do hope to tie it all together someday, somehow. I wrote the majority of it on my blackberry during the flight to see my brother and father. I also read "The Light Between Oceans", a phenomenal fiction novel by M. L. Stedman during the break. I recommend it to everyone.