What is the light that you have shining all around you?

With all the confusion and sadness that I have felt lately, music has been a comfort. Music can be like a back-rub when our minds are knotted up with the detritus of emotional distress. And as therapeutic as it can be when we are sad, music works even better when we are experiencing emotional states that are complicated - specifically, ones that are beyond our ability to deconstruct.

I have been stockpiling music for all the unforeseen future moments when I will need it. I believe that The Clientele alone will be able to carry me through every nighttime snowfall for the next fifty or sixty years. And one can only hope that The Field will eventually have enough music to soundtrack every plane flight for the rest of my life without growing stale. If I am worried about anyone, it is that Joanna Newsom will only put out a few pages worth of lyrics a year. It is tricky because there are no close substitutes. At least in the case of Noah Lennox you have everyone from Memory Tapes to Luomo to Ducktails to [imperfectly] fill the void.

But what to make of the Flaming Lips? They should have tattooed onto me already, at this age, and having listened to them for so long, but I have no specific memories to cling to, besides learning to play "Fight Test" on the guitar - which doesn't count. I think I missed the train if I didn't have at least one night, laying in the grass on a hill, drunk as hell, listening to The Soft Bulletin.

Come to think of it, I have the same complaint about Boards of Canada.

Why is it that so much music creates a stronger impression at nighttime? Easy, it's visceral, and it's related to what Borges said about nighttime:

"... night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."

Clarity is tremendously therapeutic, I think. Or is that backwards?

Jules after the War

"What's appalling about war is that it deprives man of his own individual battle."
- Jules and Jim

We are wired to desire success, but in the modern world, what is success? Food, shelter, reproduction? We are capable of much more. It is painful to know that we can fail, but it is worse that we are flying blind to begin with. We make our decisions about the future based on our feelings, and our decisions subsequently affect our feelings. What hope is there to read the map and navigate our future to be happy?

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I have postponed my future for much of my adult life. I do not regret this - I do not think that we should be so eager to move through the stages that we will only know once. But I must also be brave to go forward. I feel that the privileges of the modern world and the fortune of conscientiousness have taken me past my parents' destinies - I feel that I am standing on their shoulders now. In a strange way, it is my grandmother alone that I feel is beside me in what I am becoming. "There are more worlds..."

But I am neither beside nor above my own confusion with my place in the world. I want to live in peace, but the world is quicksand - the struggle to break free hastens the departure of my heart from this world.

Threading the Needle-of-the-Day

I am a thinker, but I am not consistent. (just in case anyone wanted a one-sentence overview of this post)

There are people, I am informed, that follow daily routines for significant portions of their lives - I'm talking 360+ days a year, perhaps 40+ years with minimal adjustments. At the other extreme, getting up at 7 a.m., five days a week to go to work, has often nearly killed me. Not from exertion or stress, but because it all seems so bleak. For better or worse, I like variety, and I like free choice.

This does not bode particularly well, especially if someone considers that I actually like my job, and feel inspired to do well - some of the time. What will happen when these things are no longer aligned? How long is the ramp of job satisfaction that I can hope to climb? Am I building momentum? Or am I approaching a day of reckoning?

Lately, I have found my mind to be both active and "under control" (which deserves those quotes after ten years spent on behavioral medications), although my focus has shifted. I have done a horrendous job of staying physically active since I graduated. I suppose a person can only focus on so many things at once, and I have been gearing up my brain to take on bigger and better challenges at work. On the other hand, my diet has also changed for the worse. Something tells me that school simply primes me for multitasking and productivity in a way that work does not. There are fewer shortcuts at school. The "to-do" list is more absolute.

But, these things will have to come under control at some point. I do think it is important to "keep moving", mentally - to learn to love learning so that you are constantly doing it. This has been hard for me because I had an early innate response to shy away from things that I did not understand. Teaching yourself to act oppositely to that predisposition is a pot of gold.

Some day, I will have to learn to execute more consistently; I stopped working out and eating healthy after two short years. How do I build a mindset that will force me to get exercise and proper nutrition every day, without waste or excess, and enjoy it for the next 40+ years?