Up All Night: Soliloquy

I enjoy talking to myself, as I've already mentioned in passing while writing a different entry ("Anxiety, Uncertainty, and Other People: It's Complicated"). I think about Hamlet, the protagonist of Shakespeare's play of the same name. Hamlet gives so many speeches to himself. His thoughts race almost endlessly. His feelings careen wildly through the curves of manic anger, resentment, and depression. Hamlet really has no idea where he's going until he utters fateful and apprehensive words. One of the Hamlet's greatest strengths and weaknesses is that his words are his deed. Words can be a powerful deed, but the word alone is not always the entire deed. An ironic lesson for such a prolific wordsmith as Shakespeare to give us?

I've directly confronted this personal epidemic of talking too much and listening too little. How many Horatios are trying to give each of us good advice, as Horatio tried to help his friend Hamlet relax and focus his thinking*, while their advice is too long and too often ignored?

Hamlet also needs silence. In many cases, silence is a proxy for ambiguity. The incompleteness of human knowledge is a hallmark of what it means to be alive and deciphering our existence. It is commonplace that each individual must be content with the exotic vastness of what we cannot know. Yet Hamlet couldn't leave space to contemplate the things he didn't know. Hamlet filled every waking moment with talking, thinking, scheming, plotting, consorting, pondering...Hamlet sealed his fate in part through his inability to stop doing anything.

It is this balance of expressing my thoughts properly when I talk to myself and leaving space to consider the consequences of what I cannot know that I seek to keep practicing. I once asked my poetry professor about my practice of writing poems in great spurts, and then not writing for a similar period. I hoped my professor could alleviate my dry spells, but he did not offer me advice on that matter. My professor simply told me that I need to let my mind lie fallow sometimes, so I don't use everything I have at once. That was tremendously strong advice.

I also notice that I've talked too much at once sometimes when I would talk to my ex-girlfriend or when I talked to other women that I felt an interest towards. Perhaps I didn't feel secure enough, complete enough, confident enough to let go...and that's a shame.

I wish I had felt stronger during those interactions. I wish I had felt the strength to let go...that's not easy when you're feeling like you barely have the strength to hold on! Perhaps that's another lesson for me: don't try to hold onto something that you can't let go. I'm not really sure if that's true. There's only one way to find out, isn't there?

Yes, there's an insane, heart-pounding, wildly unforeseeable world that none of us can corner. That world is waiting for us to explore its endless boundaries. There's only so much I can tell you about that world, or about my portion of it. Eventually, you need to return to the world and experience it for yourself - just like I do!

*(To let it be, or not to let it be...that is the Shakespearean/Beatles question!)

Resistance Is Strength

I first wrote the following thoughts in the weeks after I completed a course on Friedrich Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil". Most of the ideas below reflect but do not necessarily emulate Nietzsche's thinking - that would be impossible, because I am not Friedrich Nietzsche, and because I am hardly qualified or well-read enough to suppose that I could speak for him. Yet I can speak for myself, so here are some of my thoughts:

I have had an insight: resistance is strength. Neither acceptance nor denial of anything is enough to develop and build strength. Resistance is key.

Why resistance? Because children leave their parents and become adults. Because human beings form their own identity from the remains of their youth: the inspiration of their families and the influence of their peers. You tear down a muscle and you rebuild it – you nourish and flex and try your muscles until you're stronger. You test yourself against your fears. You prove yourself abler than you imagined. This resistance is how children become independent, compassionate, responsible adults. They resist!

Why resistance? Because intimacy is unspeakably powerful. Because people bring down their pride and their ego and share it with another person, or with an audience. Because our vulnerabilities can lead to our greatest passions and our greatest ambitions. When you feel lonely, you write. When you feel depressed, you tell jokes. When you feel isolated, you try new things. Limitations inspire creativity and fuel new horizons. Ask an author - (or a lover) - (or a comedian). They resist!

Why resistance? Because resistance is the catalyst of rebirth. Because gradual change accumulates to demolish old structures and creates a more astonishing order -- an order that is partly new, but entirely distinct and wondrous in its innovation. Because the entire process of biological evolution demonstrates the destruction and brutality and wastefulness of life itself: everything a challenge, a struggle, or a fight to the death. We emerge, we live, and we fight back...against astronomical odds. We resist!

Why resistance? Because the ability to incorporate novel ideas into existing beliefs is how knowledge advances. Because the abilities to accept nuance, to accept uncertainty, to reject uncertainty for something more powerful, to keep searching, and - most of all - to challenge your own biases, your own complacency, your own comfort...are all forms of resistance. Our world is not a black-and-white, always accept or always reject, kind of world. We inhabit a hazardous hypothesis, turbulent theory world. We resist!

Why resistance? Because it’s not wrong to make mistakes, but it’s wrong to keep making the same mistakes. Because evil isn't entirely your fault, but ignoring evil is your fault. Find the darkness in yourself and confront it. Recognize that you are its rightful owner: put it in its rightful place. Don’t blame someone else, a god, or a demon. Take responsibility for your vulnerabilities, anxieties, and fears. Realize that good intentions or inexperience, by you or by authority figures, may lead to evil. You must think for yourself. So, resist!

Resistance is strength: Because it's as profound an insight as anything in scriptures. Avoiding temptation isn't enough: temptation must be dared, lured, and faced. Evil isn't the opposite of the good: evil is a lack of the good. (Thomas Aquinas and I agree.) Evil is dishonesty - not enough honesty. Evil is ignorance - not enough knowledge. Evil is weakness - not enough patience or discipline. Evil is miscalculation - not enough empathy or foresight. You can't eliminate evil: you can only change it until it’s good. So, resist!

Resistance is strength: Because there has never been a world without temptation. Temptation is in the competition, the arms race, the nonstop grudge matches of nature. Our world's built on temptation, made in the image of temptation, dedicated to temptation. We can't create a more just world by merely overcoming that temptation: we must alter that temptation for our own purposes. We must incorporate that temptation into new ethics and new ways of living. We will neither accept nor deny temptation: we shall resist!