Above ground

Everything has a quality to it. The color red, the number seven, 2 p.m. Seven is nice, six is worse. Blue is good, red is better. 2 p.m. is lousy, 8 p.m. is alright. Don’t touch the hot stove! Touch it once, never touch it again. Every now and then, against all odds, 2 p.m. comes and goes just fine. Some might say it’s neutral.

Years used to be neutral, even good. The idea of them, I mean. I used to be interested in the mere fact that years were going by. I was in awe—how long ago a year really felt, how far from now another year would be. Time was kind of like the older sibling I never had. It was always there to comfort. I remember sitting in the back of our Honda staring out the window into the green woods near my house, suddenly understanding there would be a day when everyone in my life would be gone, including me. I knew, then, this was the universe. I was probably seven. I went to school the next day and of course couldn’t communicate this to anyone. Don’t you guys get it?? I wanted to say. Why is everyone just acting so normal?? The irony of all those years I waited to be an adult is that I’m always just going to be that child, thinking about time.

Now, a year has gone by. Not since anything. It’s just been a good old year, a normal year, a year. Another year will soon go by and it won’t be a big deal. It’s all very odd. As I move through time, unmarked by the milestones of the academic journey, I protect and numb my own consciousness from itself. Everything I do is made-up, the small routines I have to convince myself I’m efficient, the random jobs I have that do weird and specific tasks, the random jobs other people have that I know nothing about—and most people know nothing about. Even travel feels like an act of numbing, of convincing myself I’m learning and experiencing and changing, when the trip is nothing but a brief interlude in what is mostly a life of tasks to distract from consciousness. Becoming an adult feels like this exercise, or at least, this feels like the difference between adults and children. Whether or not adults know it, becoming an adult is accepting weakness, I think. The longer you’ve been living, the longer you’ve been under the influence of your consciousness, and what it does to you. It does not matter that life is much worse for some than others. Often I find those with the deepest “struggle” actually have a lot of hope. It’s the ones who’ve never un-numbed themselves, (or who were never un-numbed by the world, either, by pain or loss) that become cynical. Cynicism is a way to believe one is serious about the world and is feeling real things, but cynicism is just a mask for real feeling, a persona, another numbing tactic.

Adults are adults because of the years they have been given. Adults must take the years and do something with them that feels good, better than just living year after year. Thinking about them (as children do) and waiting for them (as children do) is not enough. We are instead allowed to think ahead about them as it pertains to our plans. So instead, we create the most dreaded concept in all of human consciousness: the timeline. Even this word gives me chills. It even looks terrible. It sounds terrible. It does weird things to your mouth when you say it, and I hate that it rhymes. But most of all, I hate its meaning, which is incorrect, which implies that time is linear. A timeline dilutes a life into milestones and interludes, to purge the years of chaos, and it feels tragic to shape years in this way. Yet, it is important we do something with all of our years. But what? The small things. Take trips. Stay put. Now’s the time. Your 20s are for growing your thirties are for… You can deviate from this timeline but don’t actually deviate don’t actually go off the rails and if you approach the rails don’t actually go off them.

You might sense that I’m a big on edge. Even as I write this, I don’t like that I’m veering into a kind of judgement. It’s great fun and quite easy to judge others and critique the status quo, the social and moral world that traps our individual minds and inserts them into the mechanical whole. It’s easy to be the man from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground who believes—

“... I’m more intelligent than everyone around me. I’ve always considered myself more intelligent than everyone around me, and, would you believe, have even felt slightly ashamed of it.”

But also:

“For the direct, lawful immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia—that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms.”

It is one of my deepest fears to be both highly intelligent and incapable of action. That being said, I equally fear numbing, which in my view is the opposite of this conundrum: relatively unaware of my consciousness and able to execute life like a machine. But then, the third layer to this “edge” is even the fact that I must be writing this at all, that by writing it I am imposing a kind of judgement on those who, maybe, fall into the latter group. This is where the difficulty arises for me: I am deeply uninterested in the idea of believing because I think, I am somehow better than other people who don’t. Even though the narrator (unnamed) in Notes from Underground loathes himself (“I am ashamed…”), he also loathes others. Really, he is trapped in his own mind, and his consciousness drives him farther underground. Who lives underground? Not humans. He could maybe use some numbing. At the same time, he is only interested in the truth. Which is preferred?

I suppose it comes down to how much you’re willing to sacrifice within the years, and your tolerance for chaos in place of the timeline. To pursue goodness, or freedom, one must first surrender to chaos, that is, welcome and entertain the breaking down of things. The more breaking down, the more numbing loses its effect. When the numbing fades, the living begins. The narrator from Notes is so stuck in his consciousness and suffering doom loop he cannot even situate himself in any kind of productive chaos, or graceful posture where the universe would grant him a path forward. He should become a writer. Creation (poesis, “to “make) is the ultimate channel for suffering.

Ultimately, some people think about these kinds of things everyday and other people don’t. Some people think about their years, and others don’t. You have to work with the mind you’ve been given. The only moral stance I’ll take here is that it is good to remain above ground, or to strive to remain above ground, even as the years pile on. Slip underground every once and a while, mull around in the dirt, and see what cynicism and ego does to you. You’ll probably just get dirt in your eyes and get even angrier.

I want to make the idea of a year feel good again, like it felt for me as a child. Everything around change is wonderful—talking about it, dreaming about it, writing about it. The most difficult moment for me is the moment of action. Now, how exactly to make this change? I’ve made changes before, sometimes too many changes, impulsively, for the sake of it, because I’m bored and sick of the same old thing. This kind of change—a real, raw, organic change— will require a lift. I’m trying to surrender to the fact that it will feel like climbing out of an underground pit into an empty, sunny, abandoned field. At first, it feels miraculous. Then, suddenly, one may want to return to the pit because down there it was easier to exist. The sun is blinding, and there are too many paths to follow. How to choose? How to trust? One may be tempted by the timeline. One may be tempted also by the machines, not to use them but to just become one (machines do not know suffering). So I would advise this person, climbing out of the pit, to go about the world trying to break their heart. Yes, breaking your heart is exactly the kind of thing you should go about trying to do. Then you’re above ground forever, guaranteed.