May 27, 2008

• Places and Personality

  No one has ever mistaken me for being an insomniac. It’s just some times, some rare days, I just lie in bed unable to sleep for no fucking reason…

  I think that almost everyone growing up who has lived in the same place for most of their life eventually starts to complain about it. If you live in the city you complain about the noise and the crowd and the busyness and the crime and how impolite everyone is or how excessively commercial everyone is, or how nobody talks to one another.  If you live in the country then you complain about how boring everything is, how quiet, how tedious life is, and how backwards everyone seems, and how there’s little room for growth or change and how there’s really nothing to do for enterainment.

  And of course if you live in the suburbs you complain about… well all of those things. And more besides.

  Yeah we love to complain about the places in which we live. We’re constantly wishing we were some place else.

  But here’s the thing though….
  
  It’s never really the place that’s the problem.

  The perceptions and expectations of the people around us act as chains that bind us to behavior patterns. Our environment seems to condition us and control us. We feel, well not comfort, but a sort of affinity in a certain place, being a certain way, living a certain kind of life.

  And sometimes you just come to hate that.

  You want to live a different life. To be a different person. You want to change. You want to act contrary to the way you’ve always acted, or to try to awaken the parts of yourself that have ever lay dormant sleeping within you. 

  And it sometimes seems like it’s the place that’s stopping you. All those people who know you as you were. All those perceptions. All those expectations. All those memories insidiously ensconced in every rock and tree, every road and wall. Memories of the mistakes you’ve made, the problems you’ve had, the choices you wish you hadn’t chosen. Memories that don’t seem to want to let you go. Regrets. They’re there crowding into every nook and corner of your brain. Everywhere you look a reminder. It’s like every time you open your eyes in the morning the smell of the past just waifs in pressing into you, paralyzing you, binding you.

  And so you just are as you always were. Again and again and again. While the bitterness within you grows a little. And you start to think, it’s this place. It’s this damnable place. If only I were some place else. If only I could just start over…

  But then sometimes you manage to get that chance. You go some place else. You have that opportunity to start over. And maybe you think, optimistically, that this time, this time since it’s a new place, things will be different.  None of those old forces will bind me. None of those old memories will keep me down. I can be whatever I want to be now. And nobody knows a damn thing about me.

  And it feels great. Like true freedom. You laugh in glorious joy at your amazing opportunity. How lucky you are. You can actually start over! YES!

  But then… the the reality sets in.

  Because it wasn’t the place. Deep down you knew that all along. It was never the place.

  And then you learn that being some place new often just means a second opportunity to make the same old mistakes all over again.

  It’s like you’ve become a traveling factory spewing out a smog of uncomfortable memories to each and every street and building you attend. Contaminating each place to make it the same again as it was before in that old place that you wished so desperately to escape.

  It’s always a mistake to presume that you can change the habits built up through a lifetime in a single day or week or month or year. All the more folly to think that just because you’re some place new, it’ll be so much easier.

  So how do you change those habits?  What if you can’t in ten years. Or a hundred. What if it’s impossible?

  You see that’s the thing though? If you are waiting to be a certain person before you accept yourself you’ll never be satisfied. It’ll just be a constant journey to find and awaken new you’s. Either you become a farce, superficial pretense of who you are inside, or you become a tragedy ever being the same outside as you least want to be and wondering again and again “why didn’t I just act differently?“

  Instead, you have to accept and respect not the person you will be after you’ve changed, but the person who is changing. The person who strives and struggles. The person who stumbles and fails and gets back up and keeps going anyway. The person who bit by bit by bit becomes a little bit more what he or she wishes to be or believes they should be.

  You have to accept that person. However slow and slight annoying and damnably frustrating that change might be. The habits built up over a life time might well take another lifetime to alter, but that changing person is still there the whole time. And his value is not derived solely on the basis of the absolute success or failure of his most current endeavors. Every little bit of growth should be valued and cherished. It’s a step in the direction of further evolution.

  And then you wait and see. Value the changing striving entity that is before you at every step of the journey. And just see what happens. What will you become?  Who will you become?

  You might even end up surprising yourself.

  I hope so anyway

  • 6:14 am
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