A lot Most of my music is about dying, sadness, loss, futility, questioning and chaos. That says a lot about me, and some might wonder if I’m constantly in a state of despair and downright hopelessness. Every day is a struggle on how to navigate life. Navigate it in a way that ideally promotes love, not hate.
The simple answer would be ‘no’, I’m not constantly feeling overtly hopeless.That said, I do believe we have lost our ability to think about the high level stuff in life by being obsessively busy. We are adding a lot of things to life, but often not willing to wrestle with hard thoughts.
In any given day, I’ll ask myself about the state of some affair as it relates to people. Call it a minor obsession with the human condition.
Its not smart to be milling around in a state of quandary without, sometimes, reaching consensus on some or other topic. I’ve made peace with some tough life questions, but I still actively think that ‘thinking’ is important. Thinking about you, stuff and the world is important. How did anything change (even if in your own small version of the world) without some thought striking someone.
How much time I spend in that space is debatable. I’m probably invested in some random thought about 40 – 60 percent of my day. It will take me 3 – 4 weeks to get to the bottom of it, and when I do I still question it.
Its sort of micro vs macro brain processing, where micro is all the small to-dos and current items in your own life. The macro is something bigger and more unifying. Its the questions and struggles all of us face, and the idea that if we all spent a bit more time trying to get to the bottom of them we could experience more than we knew possible.
We could make real change. Or we could at least understand more.
The micro stuff, from what I can see, keeps us too busy and prevents us from walking right into a wall of toughness. Who wants to self-analyse and assess the world that much? I think I do. I think I have chosen a life where I will choose to struggle and wrestle with life itself.
I do, because I think its the only way we can get better, change and accept. I do because peoples heads in the dark part of humanity sometimes provides a clue about how we operate.
Seriously, who wouldn’t want to try and figure out as much as they could about the people around us, and the people within us? Who wouldn’t want to challenge what we think we know, by fighting with some seriously hard material.
Peck, explains it well. Its not simple and I’d like to die knowing that I tackled life knowing it was complex, and appreciating that I didnt take the easy way. Ever.
“Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multi-dimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience — to appreciate the fact that life is complex.”
― M. Scott Peck
Incidental Living 