whatisgoodaboutthis

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

The Human Condition

The intertwining of one’s psyche is a natural side-effect of any and all human relations, especially applicable to romantic relations. Knowing this can only be achieved one of three ways: 1) Reading and reflecting; 2) Learning through the experiences of others; and 3) Through personal experience. It is the latter that is the most common route to gaining this wisdom, and not all who experience the often negative and painful side effects of personal experience fully learn from it.  It seems more than common for individuals to hop from one romantic relationship to the next, the fear and pain of being alone and processing their existential wounds too daunting, and more easily covered up with a fresh and new bundle of psychological idiosyncracies as found in a new partner. Though this is the common approach, it is misguided. To take the time to reflect, to fortify one’s internal sovereignty, one’s soul, is the path of the wise. Reflecting on the positive and negative aspects of the previous encounter with a unique individual that involved deep psychological integration can only be beneficial to any individual.  All that said, I’ve gained, through much grief, deep insight into the sphere of conscious we as individuals possess, and the importance of setting firm boundaries in the experiences we allow and do not allow. Boundaries, in other words, are of the highest importance in cultivating a content and happy life. Coupled with a firm understanding of one’s own values, one is thus better armed to spot “red flags” in potential relationships, whether professional, romantic, or platonic. Too often toxic traits in the other are left ignored to the peril of peaceful, content, and productive relationships. From the music a person listens to, to their drinking habits, to whether or not their parents divorced when they were younger, all contribute to understanding the risks and potential for negativity in the other; granted, it is possible for a person to overcome those psychological wounds and negative habits, it can only be done if a presence of self-awareness and drive for growth is found in said person.  Throw in the usual suspects of the human condition: illness, tragedy, technological reality, propaganda wars as constant, and you find that navigating reality is often more than a challenge. To be aware of these facets of reality may or may not be a blessing; to be aware of the philosophies of the Ancient Greeks further compounds the challenge of “fitting in” to “normal” society, often perhaps akin to a collective psychosis, or as some have termed a “second reality” imposed on true reality. One often finds themselves in the position of having to fake, or to act, a role in order to encourage a harmonious psychological environment in either a romantic relationship or in a work-culture.  The human condition. Not forever, no. A blip in an infinite parade of the universe. But what a strange blip. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

Snow falling quietly in the night

November 18, 2018

Ibex Valley – Mom's House

I type these words after a very long few years of trial and tribulation. At the moment, I am suffering from what has dogged me for over two years, an unknown illness that has gotten progressively worse, crescendoing in April this year, which saw me bedridden for one month. At present, my ability to eat is highly constrained: no sugars (including fruit), no gluten (gliadin), no dairy (casein), and a handful of vegetables including mustard, garlic, broccoli and kale.

What started out as a red itchy rash spring of 2016 has turned into an albatross on my neck, haunting me as I go through some of life's most challenging moments as a human. From the death of my father, to several friends, to being betrayed and abandoned by the one I loved, to losing my job, this illness has been with me.

As it stands, I am starting a job with the Yukon Government, one that is fairly boring and requires minimal effort, and is effectively soul crushing. But my mental capacity is so diminished that I am embarrassed to say I can hardly function at this job. It is infuriating. It feels like I have the engine of a rocket but am not able to hit the ignition. Despite this reality, my inner spirit burns with ambition. , I am in the process of applying for a government relations manager role with Sun Life in Toronto. Sadly, were I to get selected, I'd likely be not able to even relocate to Toronto due to my illness. Even as I write these words, I feel as if I am on heavy pain killers: I am dizzy, light headed with a migraine; my eyes sting and feel as if something is pushing them out of my skull.

So here I sit, in my widowed mother's home, writing out my worries, my frustrations. 32 hard-earned years have brought me here, to a place that seems less a plateau and more the final chapter in a sad and colourful life. My soul is miserable, though it tries to keep cheery, with songs, with poems, with remembering what to be thankful for. My heart is ever broken. The pain, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, is with me, always. I see no exit to this Hell. Try as I might, and I continue to try everything – from chelating agents to activated charcoal to perhaps 20 different types of vitamins and supplements, there is no sign of improving.

My friends can't, try as they might, understand my predicament. They watch with concerned eyes from a safe zone of health, of family, of vitality, of love. They watch their friend getting helplessly thrown among crashing waves, struggling to keep his head above water, yet start to lose hope, stop to call, or shine a light, the further from shore I get.

So here I am, blessed with that understanding of life as is usually reserved for those at the end of their candles, with a bitter sweet understanding as to the importance of enjoying what little light I have left before the candle is forever snuffed out to eternal blackness.

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

Feeling Good

“As soon as my flow starts, I compose art like the ghost of Mozart” - Eminem  I’ve conquered back psychic space formerly dominated by my most recent love. I feel a lot better having secured that territory. I’m back on solid ground emotionally and am back to my old self, that self that I had in 2016 before I was hit with existential blow after blow after blow. The pain of 6 deaths of those close; the challenges of having an undiagnosed illness; the emotional patience and torture of being with someone asymmetrical as far as emotional intelligence and experience goes.  I did tread briefly on an old path, the Chilean path, but found there was no heart on that path, so disengaged. Now I feel bad for having caused any hurt to the Chilean, Jenny, who came up for a weekend in Montreal and dropped $2500 USD (!!! WTF) on me in two days, but I feel it best that I am honest with both her and myself.  So now I brainstorm. Goals, values, life. Health is primary, and selfishness will be my guiding compass for some time I think. Working on inner healing, on wisdom, on health, and career. Whether to seek work in Victoria, BC, or back in Whitehorse, that seems to be the big question. Though I do like the idea of teaching English in Asia, as a friend of mine will be doing in Hanoi this fall - he left the federal service in Ottawa to follow this path.  The moment sees me freshly returned from a fabulous 4 days in PEI, where I met salt of the earth folks that each inspired me in their own ways. From a carpenter specializing in 18th century carpentry (23), the daughter of a lobster fisherman who is a 911 operator (29), to an 83 year old Californian woman travelling the world for the last 20 years. They were real humans with no pretence, and none had social media. I’ll be in Montreal for two weeks, with no real plan while here save for visiting friends. I even have friends coming up from DC to see me for a weekend, which will be nice. Then it’s off to Haida Gwaii for 3 weeks before I return to the Yukon.  I’m 31. What a life it’s been already. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

Take me back to the night we met. Take me back to kissing under a blanket on a rooftop in Montreal, the night of the riots and swat teams in the streets. The night before we both left the city. Reading an older post involving a dialogue with, among other characters, Heart and Brain, I see that Brain had its advice and intent put in the back seat to Heart. Hence the march of sad posts lately.  What happened? Heart was put in the drivers seat when Brain thought that, miracle of miracles, true love was at hand. But it was a mirage, and now both suffer deeply, and will suffer deeply for some time.  What compounds this suffering are existential factors that are inescapable: I am suffering from not a chronic disease as earlier mentioned, but, as my Doctor said, some serious, yet-to-be-determined autoimmune disease. Its symptoms are global: from digestion to physical pain in the digestive tract, all of my joints, and my eyes, to severe cognitive and neurological issues that involve hearing, eyesight, twitching, thinking, reading, planning, and remembering. The Hell is that my emotional memory is still strong. I have been bed-ridden for 50% of the time, and for 2 weeks last April lay in bed, ruminating on the past, feeling absolutely alone in the world.  I suppose, had my relationship not gone the way of the dodo bird, things wouldn’t be that much better. It’d have been hard for any partner to help in a situation like this. But just for once, it would be nice to be with someone that loves me enough to walk through the challenges of health and its side effects, of grief and its side effects, to walk through those challenges to the other side of this jet black valley to the light.  My love for Amani was love I had never had before. It was pure. It was true. it still is true. And that’s why, despite all my other afflictions, my broken heart causes me the most suffering.  As the years pass by, I think it natural that minds reflect on mortality. Plato wrote about this when his characters (I believe Socrates was one of them) would sit in the shade of the Cypress trees. The shade represented death. What I have come to see after sitting in this shade so far is that, by far, the most important things in life are relationships. Companionships. I’ve also been oscillating with an understanding of “God” that reflects my understanding of “Love” - both are so connected to the other. Love. True Love. When I was lucky enough to be with the woman I truly loved, I felt close to God. I don’t know if ever I’ll see Amani again. My heart yearns for her, and obviously hopes that we will be together again. My brain is rightly cynical. People have their own paths to walk, and need to learn their lessons on their own unique terms. I wish her the best, and hope she follows her heart through this life. As for myself, the amount of pain I’ve experienced, and the suffering, is about enough for a lifetime. With the illness I have, it sometimes feel like I’m nearing the end of my book. Like I’m waiting to die. With so many cracks in my heart, with a body that is damaged, and apparently shutting down, and with a mind that has been shown wisdom, knowledge, and reflected on the way reality is unfolding for the human species in the age of technology... well, let’s just say this old soul is ready to call it a day.  Presently, the only thing I can “do” is accept, and wait, as I cannot do much else - barely able to read these days. One hopes the Canadian medical system will be able to diagnose me. But the timeline for such a solution has been painfully long. It has been over one year and I have not a hint of what it may be. Ultimately, health is my priority. My heart is pulling me towards someone that does not want me. My mind must muffle my heart, and steadfastly trudge through this Hell of a reality I am in, in search of a diagnosis, treatment, and way forward. Holy fuck life can be brutal. I not only lost my Dad, my health, my love, but I lost my dreams. Take me back. Take me back to the night we met. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

I’m a lyrics kind of guy. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

Trouble, Travel

When I was in the hospital in 2014 due to a life threatening illness, I stumbled upon a poem left on the cafeteria chalkboard by a terminally ill patient. It hit me hard then, and has never really left my mind. As the years pass, the poem means more and more to me: Trouble, travel Music, Art A kiss, a frock A rhyme I never said They fill my heart They just help Pass the time  To me, it means that something precious has been lost, and will never be gained again. Like a bird losing its wings, or a piano player losing his hands. No matter what objective joys, sweet nothings, or material goods come into the reality of the being that has lost its most treasured possession, that being will never be fulfilled. The heart will never be made whole again. For me, it is about learning to live with a broken heart. All of the experiences and money in the world... they mean nothing. They are distractions from the pain, but will only ever be distractions. It’s a poem from the early 20th century, but it seems that is a poem written for life in the 21st century. Or perhaps life as an adult that has had their wings clipped. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

Oh, Joni. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

Hindsight gives you 20-20 on just how sweet, how pure, and how golden certain moments were in life, moments never to repeat. They are gold nuggets in an otherwise barren mountain. How much I treasure the gold that I have found, the gold of my memories. I’ll treasure my rich moments that I’ve had in my life as long as I have memory. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

This song seems more meaningful in light of recent events. That someone special sent it to me makes it that much more impactful. Perhaps it was a glimpse through time of what I’d experience in the near future, the now, soon to be past. The older I get, the stranger life becomes. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

Zen

Everything is impermanent. Everything. Emotions, health, relationships, mental states, pleasure, pain. The internet. It is only severe pain that gives one the real initial powers to bend the mind to this truth. The troubles and sufferings of life, they burden the soul. “Give them to God,” and the burden becomes lighter.  The amount of stress that has led me back to writing this post is as follows. I suppose I should root it in the losing of an election, and therefore my job.  1) Moving to Toronto 2) Being horribly sick and not having medical professionals adequately diagnose me 3) Not being able to get a job in Toronto due to illness 4) Having very low self-esteem that undermined my relationship with a woman deserving of more than I was giving, though a woman not understanding of the situation I was in  5) Failing getting a job, and the pressure of an ill father, moving back to the Yukon to be near my Dad. The stress of moving gets heavier the older you get, and this I now know 6) Losing a friend my age on September 2nd of 2017 7) Losing my Dad on September 18th of 2017 8) Being so hurt, I withdrew into myself, and my partner took it as a reflection of my love to her, which was wrong of her, and I handled her response poorly with my own ill-crafted emotional response, and rather than communicating, she bottled it up 9) My health kept getting worse and worse, and I hit rock bottom while visiting my partner in Europe after eating things I shouldn’t have, causing me to damage our relationship. She, not understanding my pain, thought I was intentionally sabotaging us 10) Getting diagnosed with a chronic disease in January. Life long. This was crushing to my state of mind. I was drowning in pain and hopelessness and grief from so much pain and loss, I put all of my hope into my relationship  11) Breaking up with my partner. It was too much pressure for her, and the more she went out with friends and met people, the less she wanted me in her life, the more she focused on our negative, rather than the positive experiences, together. It hurt so so SO bad, and still does. The situation, me being ill, and her going out a lot, reminds me a bit of what happened in 2014. Some horrible deja vu. A pasture is greener, single friends enable, and a partner is forgotten, is abandoned  12) Losing my job. My illness allowed me to fail with flying colours the interview portion for getting a permanent position with my job. I came in 2nd among 45. My former partner didn’t seem to phased by all of the suffering I was in. I was broken. The drive home from work that night I was passing a tractor trailer and had a quick thought of swerving head on to meet it: the pain would vanish. All my problems would go. Morality and unintended suffering for other lives quickly erased that thought. My world was collapsing all around me, and I felt horribly alone  So now I have the opportunity to reflect on my life. Thankfully, I’m in a peaceful space in the world. No pressures, no mechanical societal expectations or distractions or scheduled life segments as found in the city. I am blessed, truly, to have these sorrows in this space. Books and writing will be my sword and shield.  Reflecting on my past, reflecting on love, on empathy, on what I do and do not want in a partner, and where I do and do not want my life to go, will be my mission. I certainly do not want a socialite, nor a heavy drinker, in my life. I need someone who knows what it’s like to go through Hell, and keep going. No more fair weather lovers. But how do I screen for this? The problem with intelligence is the positive correlation with lying: the smarter a person is, the better they are at lying. So rather than pursue, I will tend my own gardens, and see what comes.  I am hurt. I am deeply hurt. Losing my Dad was more pain than I’d ever experienced in my life. Not having a sympathetic partner that understood and tried to help my pain, and my health issues, really hurt. Finding out her true colours when I was at my lowest really hurt. I think, ultimately, our thresholds for experience were different.  But everything is impermanent. This too shall pass. Dust in the wind. Appetites, temptations, veils of ignorance, these are things that populate our preciously short lives, and only after severe pain, loss, and suffering, do we get rattled aware to them, to really listening to our inner compasses. I truly believed her to be the best friend I’d have for life, the one to grow with, to deepen my spiritual roots in life with. She was looking back at the negative, like the woman in the Bible who looked back at God destroying the city and turned to salt. She forsook the future to focus on the past, and that took her from me. To forgive her who believes she did me no wrong is now one of my challenges.  Onward. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

Fair weather love is the worst. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you have much control over which temptations you click on. Silicon Valley’s technologists and their ever-perfecting algorithms have discovered the form of bait that will have you jumping like a witless minnow. No information technology ever had this depth of knowledge of its consumers — or greater capacity to tweak their synapses to keep them engaged. [...]. In an essay on contemplation, the Christian writer Alan Jacobs recently commended the comedian Louis C.K. for withholding smartphones from his children. On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained why: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.���[...] He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist. And then he was able to discover, in a manner now remote from most of us, the relief of crawling out of the hole of misery by himself. For if there is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”[...] The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn. [...] I haven’t given up, even as, each day, at various moments, I find myself giving in. There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived. And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-technology-almost-killed-me.html

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

That 1:03 to 1:20 though. This past June I was able to see a friend of mine’s girlfriend sing a piece in a Mozart production in Lausanne, CH, which gave me similar back-tingling feelings as this piece. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

I’m gettin’ there, one day at a time. 

[whatisgoodaboutthis]

One of the anthems.  “My heartbeat’s rhythm is a lonesome sound”