What do I want from any given moment? To feel like I'm doing approximately what I want, or have access to what I want if I'm not. I can work without all of the old issues of my old computer on this new one. When I want to practice the piano with weighted keys and build proper muscle memory, it's an arm's length away. If I'm curious why a graphic novel series is confidently 5 stars on Amazon, I glance to the books stacked on my speaker.
"Possibility," whatever we can make of the word, is the operative variable at the heart of my being. I fundamentally want to enable as many worthwhile and engaging possibilities as I can. I need that to be true. The job can't trap me. The "debt," if abstractly represented in the math, needs to be met with a conceptual framework to match equaling a result of "what's possible."
I'm going to Chicago tomorrow to celebrate the 20th anniversary of an album. It's Wednesday. It's possible to call off. It's possible to buy tickets, drive 4.5 hours, rock out, work remotely, and drive back for a comedy show the next afternoon. It's possible to get to Louisville and back the next day and Fort Wayne the day after that.
I talk to ~130 every week, some going on 11 months now. I hear constantly about restrictions and wishes and "it'd be nice" sentiments. Don't you understand? I'm busy. The kids. My job won't. My finances aren't where I want. Literally anything stands in for restricting possibility. When you close off your options, you don't learn new ways of coping or fixing the problems you encounter with a rigid mind. You don't know what's possible. You can't recognize what it sounds like. You don't have any real feel or sense that "possible" even exists.
I remember crying a lot as a kid in response to my mom. I did things I didn't understand, got responses that terrified me, stuck me in my shivering or pissing myself state. The "why" never materialized verbally, but the lack of an answer served to arrest anything I might access to change my perception of the situation. All I could do was cry. All I could do was stare and heave and hurt. This was my lot. This was my real. This underwrote my compulsive picking and tapping and inability to drop or stop anything from a videogame to some subject matter that might piss you off.
So many of us are locked into our terrified arrested childlike states. We know everything there is to know about what we can't do. We don't have the slightest concept of just how much is possible. We don't push ourselves past what we think we already know. We don't "independently learn" things that don't practically manifest as "do your own research." We're stuck, and when asked about how or whether we're free to move, get downright defensive you can't appreciate our rigorous squirm.
I don't know if a place exists where this accountable/unaccountable, excuses-ridden/reason building, yes we can/know your place favors the possibility-laden mindsets, but I know I need it more and more desperately each day. My practice is to relay my perspective as honestly as I feel it, build things I care about, travel to share in experiences, invite, encourage, and challenge to clarify and specify the infinitely abstract ways we trap ourselves. I'm not content to rest on "enjoy the ride" or "the work is the reward" ideas about this. I need more. I need a culture where I don't feel like I'm the only one doing the work of realizing what's possible.
Maybe it sounds incredibly selfish and judgmental. Maybe I'm just unable to hear how much genuine consequential hope may be manifest in the weekly accounts of how we're not quite ready to put more on our plates. Maybe I should borrow from the book of belaboring isolated positive examples to placate and downplay how I feel, never allowing the potential of my greedy sensibility for more to play out. Or maybe I'm right in a deeper way than I could ever speak to. Maybe more people should be like me in their own way and own lives, "but."
It's exhausting trying not to be as selfish and entitled as the environments I'm plugged into. My job and clients want to use me, not utilize who I am or what I know or how I might best work. My friends live their "functional" version of the addictive debilitating tendencies I'm trying to get my clients to interrupt and redirect. There's a, not dissimilar, sensibility in the pretentions of those in charge of "legitimizing" your ability to run a business or be deserving of enough money to live in terms removed from "sacrifice." Every hoop is justified "because." Every Ticketmaster fee "convenient" and perfectly reasonable.
I didn't expect to write this much. I just wanted to tell you I still don't care about my debt from a new angle. I'm not looking forward to trying to drive and park my truck in Chicago tomorrow, but I live in a paradigm where there's almost as many cars on the road as there are people, and you can't find one to last longer than 3 months before needing to be repaired if you don't want the kind of debt I can't psychologically write-off.
No comments:
Post a Comment