That Feels Good

Learning about yourself is a life long process, and it can be one hell of a ride that requires an immense amount of mental and physical resources, but for me, it's well worth the effort and time.

2014 has been a particularly interesting year for me thus far. I went from "falling in love" with a handful of people in the same month, a rollercoaster of emotion in my mind and surroundings, connecting to some deep hidden ancestral spirituality I had no idea existed, to being able to know what my family was dreaming or thinking of at any given moment. This year for me did not start very well in the mental realm, and I lost my mind and myself more than a few times.

I'm no longer in that state. Like most things in life, I picked up the pieces of a shattered self, and moved on, slowly restucturing myself into who I wanted to become.

I no longer can blame others for the thoughts I have and the feelings I feel and emotions I undergo constantly. Of course we all influence each other and our world is an interconnected one, but ultimately, I am the one who thinks my thoughts and who chooses how to react and interpret them. As an adult now, I can walk away from most things that make me feel uncomfortable, and I can now choose who I befriend and want to build relationships with.

Going from chaos early in the year, I knew I had to do something. Similar experiences had happened in my life before, and I didn't want this to be a repetitive cycle any longer. The emotional and mental chaos that I started the year off with was the final crunch in me developing a flexible, but stern, life long maintenance plan for myself. It was the final pressure point of something I had been trying to do my whole life: love myself and especially love my thoughts, but more importantly, to be able to change my thoughts to be more positive and more the way I wanted them to be.

The constant maintenance of my thoughts won't exactly ever end, but as I'm learning it does get easier with time and experience. Like I said before, investing in myself is one of the best things I have ever done. I highly recommend it. I tried a bit of everything, from intense meditation, to scientific explanation, to just a whole bunch of things I was curious about. I was never afraid to take the plunge into much of anything. However, I did get tried from all this plunging, this "believe it and it will happen" attitude, at least in the sense where it was ingrained into me culturally to dream big, sometimes too big, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to believe.

So where am I now? Well, I still don't have all the answers as to who I am because that's something that constantly changes and will continue to develop. What I can say however, is that I'm much less reactionary. Because I knew dark anger and deep pain so well most of my life, I also got to learn the types of actions and thoughts that can inflame those things for me. Because I've spend so much time contemplating my thoughts and who I am, I usually know if I'm allowing myself to bury an unpleasant something or other inside of me in an attempt to avoid it. I can usually figure out where this unpleasantness stems from, and I'll have a conversation with myself in order to deal with it. More importantly still, I decide on actions to take to address these unpleasantries and then I act on them. If something seems to linger, I'll let it sit for a while, there tends to never be any quick fixes to anything, but I still choose how I react to these thoughts.

I took a ton of lessons from the plants, and especialy trees. These living beings have taught me so much about patience and the pettiness of a ton of stuff we get preoccupied by. A tree sits for years, and though it is an active agent in its environment, it doesn't run around or worry too much about time as we've defined it.

Now I think of time more like I did when I was little, and I do things like look at the wind wisping through the leaves, pick up bugs, stop mid walk to pick up and admire a crimson-colored leaf, and simply enjoy the simplicity of silence, and most awesomely, the silence in my mind that I get more frequently. The silence allows the ideas I really care about to ferment and develop, to imagine new connections and creative ways of explaining it to others. At my core, I am a sharer of ideas, a teacher some may say.

I've always been a deep thinker, ever since I was little, I thought about everything. I still do that, and just like when I was little, I don't let too much preoccupy me any more, nor do I bite off more than I can chew. When I was young, I didn't have much control over my social environment. Simply put, it was a good mix of chaos and untraditional stability. I may have had a "rough" childhood as defined by a ton of folks, but I usually had food, had a ton of people around me, and was presented with a ton of opportunity to socialize with people from all parts of life. Indeed, my childhood was not text-book happy, but it taught me how to adapt quickly, how to respect people because we're all in it together, and that there is no such thing as a good or bad person, we are all just breathing beings living on this earth together, and how we choose to live our lives collectively is all up to us. I learned this by the time I was like 8 or something, a simple but valuable lesson.

That's where I'm back at, but now with more knowledge that I've acquired in the last 10 years or so of my life. I guess a ton of my adult life was a way for me to be certain that I was sure about who I was as a person, and now I can say with confidence and pride that I'm the only me that exists, can exist, and will exist. Unique, but still a crucial member in a collective existence if I choose to be.

That's what I learned after my rough mental start to this year. We have a choice, no matter what. Resources may differ, and circumstances can greatly influence choice in ways we aren't even aware of sometimes, but we still have a choice. Existence may or may not be random, we may all believe different things about everything, but what I think is more important than all of that is how we choose to exist together. Not just people, but the planet and the whole of known space as a whole.

Then I bought some trees and some more plants to add some life to my apartment. They teach me how to be patient, how to be more meticulous, and the idea that sometimes the best gifts and senses of accomplishment come only after years of work. It's like caring for a fruit tree your whole life and when you are old, the tree finally begins to give fruit. The important question I ask myself in this case is "was all that time and effort I poured into the fruit tree after all these years worth every moment?" The answer for me is quite clear now, "well, if the fruit tree is myself, then of course, and if my fruit can help enrich everything else, then even better."

I've been writing my dreams down most every time I sleep or nap, been more reserved, been a ton more contemplative and curious. I read books about how things work, I ponder space and the stars, I water my plants, and sit on my veranda listening to music, sometimes drinking a beer and watching the moon. I dream all the time, but not of a future I want to achieve, but a present I've learned to accept, to cherish , and to be a part of as fully as I can. Then I smile more genuinely, I don't worry about my silence being socially awkward because I know I am thinking and imagining like I'm so good at, and I've just learned to be, watching the wind go by and carry microscopic life all over this planet. It's no longer glimpses of the person I want to become that I experience occasionally, but rather it's living a life where I have developed and continue to nourish a sort of pride and happiness in the person I am in the moment and what I've been able to accomplish thus far.

Of course I'm not done living, and I'm going to do so much more with this life so long as I'm breathing, but I no longer feel pressure to be this "great person" I thought I should be or that I thought others wanted me to be. Fact is, I've accomplished so much in my short life, and it's something for me to be proud of. I have the degrees and international experiences to better demonstrate my capacities, but those things are just milestones, not deterministic factors in what I will do in the future. If that were the case, I would still be studying only literature instead of now being interested in how to use images and narratives to explain scientific concepts. I'm also realizing that I have a way with words and that teaching science is a very positive potential career path in the next part of my life. I'm always curious, always pondering and trying to make connections, and it took an adulthood of incredible life lessons and experiences to help me realize that my mind is all mine, and that I can use it however I want. Then, I choose to stay curious, to learn as much as I can about how everything around us works and is connected, and that it is very likely that my ability to explain complex things simply is one of the most effective and positive contributions I can give to this world. That feels good to know about myself.