You want things. That's what it is to be human. A whole intermixing of thoughts, dreams, hopes, fears, compulsions, and quirks. But no man (or woman!) is an island, and as it turns out we exist in a social ecosystem in which we have to interact and constantly deal with the thoughts, dreams, hopes, fears, compulsions, and quirks of other people. These people, of course, have to interact with each other. So what's the truth about human interactions.
Well, clearly, it's complicated.
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kant, they've all written books with super memorable titles that really sum up their personalities and thinking - at least at the time when they wrote them. Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good & Evil. Kierkegaard wrote The Metaphysics of Ethics. Kant wrote Fear and Trembling.
If I were to write books of that nature today I think one would be called The Essential Tension (the other would probably be called The Path of the Resplendent Sun, but that's another post). It just gets at something that I've been trying to communicate, trying to fully form in my head, for some time now. I think it really would take a full book for me to get it out in a way I found satisfying.
Essentially, The Essential Tension would be about this tension that happens between human beings, themselves, others, and their environment, especially where it comes down to our identity, goals, and desires. There's this constant invisible movement that happens inside each of us, unseen by all others (and often ourselves) as we move towards what we say we think we want.
I mean, just take a second and think about it. If someone were to ask you what you want with your life, what would you say? Well, you'd feel pressure from yourself and the other person to say something that was actually possible. Maybe not the worst restriction, except for the fact that you don't actually know what's possible, even for your own life. I can prove this. In order to know 100% for sure what was possible for your life, you would have to be able to perfectly predict every possible future from your current point and it's probability of happening. Humans are notoriously bad at this sort of thinking.
But it doesn't stop there.
You'll not only want to say something that's possible, you'll further restrict your options to what seems plausible. You don't want your friend to scoff when you say what's happening in your mind. Better think of something realistic. I absolutely hate that word. Realistic. It has nothing to do with what's actually real so much as what can be believed by the average person. But the average person has a tiny, tiny imagination. It's not necessarily their fault. They've been taught be school, society, their parents, everyone else, about what's possible. And they believed them.
I suppose in that sense I'm a bit of a rebel. I've rejected those assertions and have basically staked my life on their essential tenets being wrong. And hey, I'm not saying that it isn't good to have a solid life plan. I'm just saying that I have deeply regretted every time I let fear, uncertainty, or doubt stop me from trying and I absolutely refuse to waste another moment of my life doing so.
If you try and fail, fine. But less forgivable is not even making the attempt, and most contemptible of all is not even having the imagination to imagine something better at all. There may be difficulties in reality, granted. But in your mind? In your mind you are free. More on this later, but for now I'm getting way off topic.
There's a tension that happens between us and all around us. They want things. We want things. They don't want us to have things. We want things from them. And so, it seems like the truth about being human and interacting with other human beings is, at it's core, a matter of tension. Of being able to deal with tension, being able to navigate it. And, perhaps most importantly of all, being able to let it go.
But tension is persistent. It's a rodent of the mind. It hides in the long alleyways and dark corners of our subconscious mind. And that self same mind uses those shadows, those blindspots, to play a neat trick on us: we say that the tension is caused by, or has the root in, other people.
That's not right. It can never be right. Sure people can do things that cause it, but the tension itself always exists within us, and therefore in us is where it must be resolved. And that's the lesson. The heart of the matter. The essential tension is always within us, and only by letting it go can we ever really have what we need and want.
Tuesday, October 24th, 2017
Source: 1