Becoming something…

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Here we are again, the re-run. Jesus up on the cross and Easter plays out again. I am Catholic, but this day is of mixed meaning. Recent revelations have me feeling like the most religious in my family. This is odd. I spent my middle school years collapsing under the pressure of my false understandings of my religion, rejecting it soon thereafter. Much of this pressure coming from the understandings and faith taught to me by my parents.

Today, my partner and I sat and watched a History Channel account of Jesus and his life. He wanted to do something “Jesusy.” This was followed by a viewing of the first Austin Powers movie, International Man of Mystery. A traditional Easter celebration.

Turns out Jesus had a fro and the 90’s brought an end to shagging freely. Seemingly eyeballed by my ancient feeling religiosity and present idealism of sexual freedom, I’ve spent too long crucified by my own belief in others ability to support me. Esteem through sexuality, err sex, and guidance. False guidance that has me feeling much about my sexual history in way that I used to criticize the faithful.

As I watch this re-run and it’s earlier than expected this year, the story is repeated and unchanged, for a reason. The collision of religion that had become overly institutionalized full of wrongdoings with its people. The equality of both, brings the collapse of both.

Refreshed in belief, I am infant. Restrained in sexual self-exploitation, I am immature.

With all my faults in deconstruction, I now understand the power of something greater. The power of something to support me and finding the power to be that something.

Does our society make it hard to feel humbled? Can we feel humbled to something other than money and power? How?

“You emerge victoriously from the maze you’ve been traveling in.”

Life sure does feel like a maze, does it not? Wandering looking for the right direction, knowing at any moment we might walk right into a wall. The worst part is that we are often doomed to back-track. At best, we find ourselves busting through the wall but only to find ourselves lost again, with little frame of reference. It is part pre-determined and part under your control.

There is no alternative to being yourself. I think mostly it has to do with your attitude along the way.

You have experienced parts of the maze behind you, but not all of it. Has it shaped you? A product of our experiences or not, we have got to start listening to the scale to which we define ourselves. The confusing reality is, often the walls are miles apart and filled with millions of people. Life isn’t long enough to assume you can deduce the way out through guess and check. The cheese might not be as close or as far as you think. Without tangible walls to give a sense of direction or a map to the maze ahead (or the one being built), why are we full of this concern. You can define ‘this’ how you like, but even if the concern is not to have one, what is it in context to?

We often look to our most local of mazes through which we see ourselves traveling, forgetting the immensity of the one we are actually in.

Leave your home, find your car (or the nearest bus stop), and think about how well you seem to navigate the most local of mazes. You are probably doing just fine along life’s maze. Stop looking for the walls, looking for the end, and fearing the retracing of steps. Otherwise, the cheese won’t have a smell anymore and your sense of direction will be localized to the smaller of life’s mazes. Because the local maze you might be stuck in, is the one inside your head.

“You emerge victoriously from the maze you’ve been traveling in.”

Don’t create context, walls to define yourself against. Self, defined, is limited to the scale of what you define it against. There is no alternative to being yourself, amidst walls you can’t see and contexts you can’t begin to define.

Are adults made? A recent article by Kay Hymowitz from City Journal suggests something about young men today in our society:

Today’s single young men hang out in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood.

Child-Man in the Promised Land by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal Winter 2008

The suggestion is that for various social reasons, we are bypassing the previous generations’ milestone of marriage and a family when we supposedly begin our adult lives with the start of our careers. That first main job and first step now equals independence. Am I socially stunted, stuck in a culturally locked puberty (video games, the internet, and career changes)? I’m not in college anymore and much of that activity has gone by the wayside. There isn’t much like the structure of a full-time job, other personal pursuits, and a growing long-term relationship to have other things take favor. Yet, I still long for the long nights, long papers, and long haphazard days.

My relationship and new job is the cornerstone to a growing foundation that I think is moving me beyond this immature middle ground. Priorities change and whether or not I like to admit it, I’m heavily invested in both. This is by choice. This implies that this stage is under our own self-control. Is it important to take action?

Action would be contrary to what is rewarded in our culture; action which requires forward thinking loses to the many short-term excited battles our cultures supports. How can the weekend (or even every day) be one of exciting battles if you are settled into a life track, one long battle with something or short ones with quick feedback and results? Immediate gratification is clearly our cultural winner. It usually takes an event or emotional commitment to be able to recognize the importance of the former, long-term action, possibly to just return back afterwards.

Even today, they say SYM (Single Young Males), Hymowitz’s term, or this millennial generation in general is distracted by many new things, a world of instant gratification. Take your college life for example.

[Jones, S] (2002) indicated that 72% of all students check their email daily, and 26% of college students use instant messaging on an average day. A similar survey in 2005 found that 83% of adults in the 18-29 age range participate in online activities [Demographics of Internet Users] (2007 ).

Digital-Distractions

We learned in and with this environment. Conveniences have become crutches.

So what of women? I don’t necessarily think they are excluded from this phenomenon but they sure are talking about it. The child-man article continues,

In Internet chat rooms, in advice columns, at female water-cooler confabs, and in the pages of chick lit, the words “immature” and “men” seem united in perpetuity…Men feel threatened by female empowerment, these thinkers argue, and in their anxiety, they cling to outdated roles.

Child-Man in the Promised Land by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal Winter 2008

The CEO phenomenon is one example of the ever growing worth and exchange value of a single individual. Females with this power, on this scale, is historically rare; they have a right to enjoy it, even in the face of the above mentioned masculine uncertainty. It would be wrong to not point out that only twelve of Fortune 500 companies are headed by female CEOs, which debunks Hymowitz’s argument above.

I’m not sure if I see it as gender specific because I feel like many women face the the same cultural pressures that us males do.

Are these trends any different from the activities of young women who are often unwilling to surrender personal freedoms to be “shackled” by motherhood? The Sex and the City generation who see marriage as an anchor and drag on their personal lives, who embrace disposable relationships and are obsessed with designer clothing?

Editorial: Beware the Child-Man?

I’ll admit my cravings and notice that I see many peers expressing their freedom. I even would go as far to say, because of a different social experience in my youth while dealing with my sexuality, I am even more immature in certain areas. My immaturity is supported. More than ever we are rewarded for growth of self and not of family or relationships if it is in the way.

So, do we continue because we can?

We all may need to read more, converse more, and look at how thin we are spread in our social world (especially if it’s virtual). I keep wondering if I should be focusing harder or caring less? I am not a SYM, the relationship disqualifies me of that title, but the cute voices on my shoulders are both telling me that the SYM life is calling. Most of us now have the freedom to develop in the context of something, say a relationship, or develop outside of that structure.

The child-man, gay-infant, and adult-girl are real. Stuck playing video games, exploring deep relationships for the first time, and keeping time with image and power, we are our own segment of society. We will become a generation around it. It feels good, but I feel detached. Our 30s will come soon, but should our goal be to cum as much as possible before it does?

Adults don’t emerge. They’re made.

Child-Man in the Promised Land by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal Winter 2008

Great minds think alike…but what great mind do you want to think like?

Another stranger

Strong teeth nibbling at the soul,
a midnight snack of attempted progress.

My feet treaded new footsteps,
from the moment I woke up.

Sore eyes for similar,
familiar lies. I’m fooling myself again.

Putting out isn’t the same, the
first time, second time, third time around.

Give me stone eyes. Eyes that find hearts
cold. Minds that build false homes in me.

Now, I’ve opened the front door, but
nothing looks familiar. Not even
his now familiar beard.

Someone else has made my bed,
and although new things feel safe,
I’ve encountered another stranger.

I went to work forgetting I have purpose. I have skills, opportunities, and my position in life to work towards something, even if it’s nothing.

Beginning a bit depressed, today wasn’t supposed to be the day that I heard inspiration and absorbed it instead of just listening to it.

A man named Jeff Johnson (BET’s Cousin Jeff) spoke as our Martin Luther King Jr. keynote. He moved and reached me.

To paraphrase and summarize in my own words, isn’t the same. I still wanted to leave you with a message.

No one was born a leader or without potential. We also cannot be things that we aren’t. At this time, we are who we are and we have what we have. Use what you have and use your position. To posture yourself into higher self, something “to be,” instead of something that “is” is falsifying your talents. Wake up from your dream and act. Words are old and can act as weights. Create your own words, story, and purpose. I hope you have the strength to be open to your own purpose. Purpose doesn’t exist in what you think is supposed to be, it is in your current situation, your now. Be now, feel now, and use now, because now ain’t forever.

Naturally, as a blogger, I’m spending some of my time learning or reading up on how to be one. Like any new thing, it’s a challenge. On a blog I read pretty regularly, ProBlogger.Net, there was a post very recently called “Don’t Just Have a Blog - Learn to Think Like a Blogger.” I realized the lessons shared there, of which the author, Darren Rowse, pulled from his personal trainer, can be generalized in a way that can help anyone in any endeavor. It has taken me a while to get into a groove with blogging and I’m still not completely there. The key is that most things that we do naturally were on some level learned. Creating habit out of what you eventually expect to come naturally takes some creative work.

Don’t just live - Learn to think as though you are living

1) Goals and Planning - Use goals and numbers to help quantify the changes you are looking to make or to help acknowledge the life you are already leading. For blogging it’s deadlines, number of words, when I hit publish, and things like this. In life, it might be counting your steps to take ownership over a route you have had trouble taking or counting towards or away from different goals.

2) Structure and Routine - This is the movement from numbers into internalizing the life you are living and hope to live. Finding this rhythm is important. You will meet your goals and plan intuitively by the very nature of it fitting into your every day life. At first it means creating the rhythm for yourself, with the essential elements of your life structured together (including the goals you met before and lessons learned from them). As it develops it will change and morph, but this foundation will provide a blueprint any time life steers you off course. Done right, you can get a sense of going with the flow.

3) Spend time with other people who live life the way you want to live life - The long winded title for how to socialize yourself. We are what we eat and we are who we are with. Since we are the culmination of our social core, cultivate it. Make it representative of your daily rhythm. Find harmonies and combinations that make (1) and (2) easier. If you began with goals that came naturally to you, then this will just seem like an easy boost. Use this as an indicator to see if you might need to reevaluate.

4) Education - Learn who you are. Learn what you want to be. If you surround yourself with the necessary information, you will always have the continued capacity to act. I have an Economics/Business degree, so I have subscriptions to The Economist and Fortune. I write poetry, so I read poetry and subscribe to Poets and Writers. There are different ways to create a learning space. So latch onto a project at work, talk to the right friends, read a related book, and dig dig dig…

5) Experimenting - If at first you don’t fricassee, fry fry a hen. Keep going and keep doing. You won’t make unconscious quick decisions unless you’ve made them a hundred times before. Take everything that you are are getting from the steps before and USE IT! Doing it different makes you more versatile as a human and at a task. What you once agonized about, will become just another trick up your sleeve.

6) Making Mistakes - Do it wrong! I’m not wishing poorly on you, but just recognize that a mistake is a chance to learn. Live in the now, not in the past or future. Hold onto a mistake in a way that you use it as a stepping stone but not as though you are being stoned.

Some of this will be hard! Don’t be afraid to settle and make some decisions.

In time as I did these things (and mainly as I just practiced blogging) my thinking changed. As it did so did my blogging itself.
Darren ProBlogger.Net

So I’ll conclude with,

In the time you live your life, just your everyday life, your thinking will change. As will your life change too.