Every now and again it is a worthwhile exercise to ask oneself: what is it that I am doing?
I’ve recently been through a few life altering experiences, and now, freshly disembarked on these new shores it behoves me to ask:
WHAT IS IT THAT I AM DOING?
Before embarking on any expository excursion of my personal goals and present state of affairs (basically tallying up the “wish to do” vs. the “am doing” to see how far from a self-appointed mark I may fall), I should like to make this statement:
Any act of self-evaluation is inherently flawed, as this is like asking a mirror to reflect upon its surface.
So, rather than try to firm up a rather sure sounding edifice of words and syntax I will do this:
I will tell you that what follows is inherently a fragmented and arbitrary exposition of the thoughts that strike me, upon self-reflection, now.
i.e. This is a foolish attempt that will only yield half-truths. On the other hand, if we switch from a Cartesian notion of a Life and the views along its path, to a Campbellian* notion of a life and what might be encountered along its path, then the vignettes I presently offer may be taken as all that can be meaningfully gleaned.
What does that mean? It sounds like gobbledygook even to me, and I wrote it! I mean to say, in order to make sense of a fragmented and arbitrary series of thoughts (as I stated this account must be) about a coherent whole (the assumption here is that a Life forms a coherent whole) we must ditch the linear (Cartesian) models of thought – planning, objective, incremental – and adopt those more oft heard from the likes of Joseph Campbell – allegorical, subjective, non-hierarchal.
Got it? So – don’t try to understand any of this as if it were to form a whole. Rather, see it like peeking in through a series of holes in swiss cheese – knowing that you will never see all of the holes, and that it is not necessary to actually SEE all of the holes to know that you are in swiss cheese, and more or less what condition that piece of swiss cheese is in.
And that is it.
The above, even though it was meant to be an introduction to something else, and even though it appears to describe next to nothing of my life at present objectively, is in fact (I’ve discovered by arriving at this position, it was not planned) what I have to give as an answer to the question: WHAT IS IT THAT I AM DOING?
I am being the awareness of fragments, seemingly incoherent and disordered, unrelated and appearing to lead off in multiple directions at once. I am the thread that links all of those fragments. I am doing not much about any of them, consciously.