“Sticks and stones may break my bones, No chance your words will phase me!”
G. Kourtesiotis
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
Or something like that. It is a common expression to capture spiritual and emotional resiliency.
Truthfully, people say some messed up things. Some things are said out of anger, some things are said by mistake, and some things are said with good intentions that just come out the wrong way. Some things are said in no particular way at all, but are taken out of context. And some things, have no explanation at all.
I am a very physical person.
I enjoy athletics, and I love training like an athlete.
I also love trail running, I find it more absorbing than regular pavement running– and though I do find myself hitting the concrete from time to time– the other day was definitely a trail day.
I remember when we met, young and naïve, together we trodden around hoping to never grow old.
Our problems were minimal, only the day at hand, and what was to become of it was our only real concern.
Friend’s forged brothers.
Years later, after so many smiles and moments of joy, but dependent on our parents plans, we had to pave way for alternate routes.
By now, our problems had become more, but not by much.
We vowed against the distance, that we would maintain the brotherly connection; We swore that we would still be best friends.
As we drifted further into adulthood, time prevailed.
There have been many times where I wanted to reach out, or to make arrangements to catch up on old times. But, our problems had now blossomed further.
Our present day has developed new relationships, different attitudes, different perspectives. This bound us to our own present place, and we could not step away from it to rebuild a past.
Technological advancement has made it easier to maintain friendships, but so much time has passed. The closeness and familiarity of the past has slowly transformed itself into the obscurity of the fast paced future.
Living day by day, our paths were now too different.Time has made us, moulded us into different people– two different men.
Despite all the difference, I still feel the love of two brothers at heart.
But, all is meaningless now. And as I wasn’t paying attention to the time that has passed, I couldn’t realize how precious life can be.
Even more so, and in the difference of the moment, where I stand with friends you made since parting ways.
Standing– remembering the days of old.
Standing–before the time comes to carry the casket where you lie.
Standing– as all these thoughts race through my mind.
If I could only fathom that your time on earth would have been so short, would we have drifted as we did?
Old friend, always in my mind next to questions as meticulous as these.
I wonder how things could have been different.
Despite my wandering mind, forever, and always you will be considered along with the best.
With all I could muster, old friend:
“Farewell, take care, so long.”
~G.K. August 17, 2011.
At 23, an old friend took his own life. There was a lot ambiguity surrounding his passing.
And though losing touch with this friend over the years, it was a death that struck a very funny chord with me.
23 years young myself, my own momentum shifted. I suddenly didn’t feel so “untouchable” anymore.
“Could I be life’s next?”I thought,
“Instantly dropping out, with no ‘apparent’ reasoning at all?”
What was I to do, but write.
This written expression dates back to August 17, 2011– 3 months after the fact.
It was written in an attempt to make sense of what had happened.
Perhaps, a subconscious attempt to “debrief”this seemingly reasonless, yet very mysterious departure.
Mindfulness Is Nonsense Once It Becomes Self-Defeating.
For the sake of this post, and how I am feeling in this particular moment, I will say it and spell it out again: mindfulness is nonsense.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for appreciating the mindfulness of a moment as I practice some form of mindfulness, awareness, and meditation daily. Likewise, I purposely try to incorporate it into every facet of my life to capture more of the moment.
Well What’s your f*king problem then?
My issue is that when we set the intention to be mindful in our experiences, we may become expectant to achieve a specific state for ourselves. Inevitably, things get lost in translations with our own skewed expectations.
Mindfulness is nonsense when our focus is aimed at being mindful, as opposed to the experience itself.
In other words, labelling our actions as mindful can limit our experience in observing things the way that we intend to experience them.
I have talked about labels before, but to spell it out mindfully,
“Once you label me, you negate me”
As soon as we call it something, it is limited to nothing more than that.
This is true to experience as well.
As soon as we intend to be mindful in our experiences, we limit our experience to whatever preconceptions we have of a mindful experience.
Some of MY OWN LIMITING preconceived attachments to mindfulness:
Road to Happiness
Zen
Slow controlled breathing
Easy, neutral state
There is more to experiencing the moment than this, but can you see how the ego’s intentions can potentially trap us with such an inhibited experience?
A crude labelling example:
Let’s imagine ourselves going out to an event, any event, and we suddenly find ourselves experiencing it negatively. We find the event so bad that we put a label on it, let’s call this “a shit time“.
Once we put our mind to those words, we limit ourselves to nothing more than what a shit timestands for in our mind.
We can try to force our way out of it, to be happy about it, but it’s still going to be a shit time.
In walking away from the event we will say:
“Today was a shit time out”
And the next day at the water cooler we will say:
“Yesterday was such a shitty time.”
And later on down your life line, you will say:
“I went to that thing once, It was…” Well, you get the point!
Conceptually speaking, mindfulness can completely immerse us in our moments.
But things can become rather skewed when our mindful practice conflicts with our urges to be more mindful, which only takes away from the experience itself.
We can become tooself-aware, where we may try to control our perception of things in the moment, when the whole basis of mindfulness is surrendering to that moment to experience it.
The ego steps in with its own pre-conceptual contributions to the experience in how it wants things to turn out for itself. This is self defeating, as the original intentions of mindfulness, is to dissolve the ego, and surrender to the moment.
Mindfulness is nonsense when our intentions aren’t clear enough. Therefore, it is important to understand why we choose to practice mindfulness in the first place.
For example:
Someone who experiences a lot of negative emotions may finds themselves frequently depressed. Such a person may then turn to mindfulness training in hopes of becoming happier. Truly, this is great, to an extent.
Take that crude example again; You remember, right!?
That “shitty time”:
We receive negative feedback from the experience during the event. For Example:
We’re at a restaurant, and the waitress accidentally dropped a meal on our lap; “Grr, it burns and my clothes are stained!”
We’re at a festival, and there is too many people here; “Grr, large crowds make us uneasy.”
We’re at a bar, and the music playing isn’t up our alley; “Grr, this song sucks.”
We’re having breakfast in a cafeteria, and someone just pissed in our corn flakes;“Grr…”
etc…
The issue can come in play when we experience this negatively and try to change our experience to suit our goal…
So,
[Insert Sh*tty Experience Here]:
“This is a sh*t time”
Turns into:
“This is a sh*t time– But…
I’m going to paint this smile on my face,
Because I just want to have a great time, and be happy!”
Fake It Till You Make It?
In this instance, we steadily assume a controlling aspect over our experience in order to achieve a result for happiness.
As we try to bring an awareness or focus onto a more “positive” light, we neglect the negative. And in this example, embracing the negativity is generally the heart of the moment.
True mindfulness is letting yourself flow from moment to moment, and if it calls for it, through contrasting emotion. Awareness is being able to identify this process happening within ourselves in our immediate perception of experience. Being mindful then, is taking it in and accepting it how it comes. And if you find yourself rejecting it, doesn’t mean it to be mindless.
Shitty experiences can still be mindful.
Mindfulness Is Nonsense: If It’s Shit, Let It Be Shit!
Ultimately, our INTENDEDÂ practice can hang us up. Actually, It is better practice to simply bring awareness to recognizing a moment for what it is how it finds us.
Keep rolling with that shitty time!
Even if it means living in it all day and night. Live in the shituntil it starts to change on its own. And if it doesn’t, keep trying new things until it does.
Mindfulness is nonsense otherwise, when we find ourselves purposely tainting, or forcing our experience to illicit a particular result; a feeling, emotion, or state.
Of course, mindfulness is appreciated most when we experience it alongside some state of bliss, however, we can’t shy away from, or avoid our negative emotions in hopes of instantly transforming them into positive ones.
The human experience means balance, whether it’s basking in the beautiful sunfor hours or rolling around in the shit for a few days.
**Damp reflections on what thunder and lightning feel like.**
Thunder & Lightning
I sit here staring through the middle of the night. That, and not much more.
The rain trickles, and pours… Then trickles…Then pours.
As it struggles to find an enduring rhythm, the subtle but unmistakable flashes of lightning that dance in the accompaniment of thunder.
What feelings wash into my being?
As my surrounding environment washes within itself, I continue to sit and stare; feeling.
It’s funny to witness playing within the boundaries of such moments.
These moments, where nothing seems certain; a complete obscurity,
A desolate experience in itself, though contrastingly relaxing.
Perhaps my yearning for solitude is being embraced in this moment,
Where nothing more but rain, dropping and spreading itself over the cold hardpavement, has been spread into existence to navigate this vast urban infrastructure.
Where is this damp moment taking me?
The outside is in, with my own inside’s out.
Cleanse this emotional obscurity, Quickly.
As I remain sedated in this state of solitary tranquility.
Immediately, I began to form visuals and associate images of the past, a past that is now very late.
Perhaps a pirate’s past, sailing the open seas in search of new opportunities to plunder.
Perhaps a life spent upon the helm; does the helmsman steer the ship, or does the ship steer the helmsman?
It is very interesting to ponder upon how such a destiny unfolds, as all of it does within a momentary second.
And here now, as I strike key after key without any real effort I can feel the yearning and power of such a moment, an identity of experience, through stored memories of a past that is hardly known.
“I don’t WANT to huff and puff. I NEED to huff and puff!”
As people, we are hilarious because we love to live in delusion. Listen, I am all for positive thinking, but not at the expense of ignoring our negative thinking and emotion.
We hear it often:
Build on yourself; Be more optimistic; Work on your greetings and smiles; Develop your openness;Be better, etc…
YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK!
It is in fact great advice, and advice I fully try to commit to in myself and others. However, I feel that we are easily clouded by such advice.
Particularly, we can find ourselves overly fixated on optimism and positivity in a way that keeps us seeking feeling good all of the time.
This creates an emotional disconnect in relation to any adverse feeling. Especially when we don’t know what to thoughtfully do with, or how to process our negative thinking and emotions in the first place.
YES, I ALSO AGREE:
“It is a muscle; Destroy your self-doubt; Destroy your fears; Destroy these emotions for the sake of liberating yourself from them.”
I get it. But, we must still experience, and fully feel the emotions that plague us.
Acknowledge it, feel the fear, sadness, hurt, pain, and whatever the hell else.
We want to feel good, for the reason being that it feels good; Okay Copernicus!
But ironically enough, succeeding these emotions comes from just that, RECOGNITION.
The ability to recognize destructive patterns, while also allowing their presence, and fully feeling to experience them.
Recognizing Negative Thinking.
Yes, yes it’s true:
I don’t want to huff and puff. But, I need to huff and puff!
The point being again, that if we don’t allow our body to experience and express itself negatively, all of the energy from our negative thinking wont go anywhere at all.
It will go nowhere.Nowhere meaning that it will go to places that we don’t want it to go.
Nowhere meaning, that it will stay trapped and emotionally bound within the structures and tissues of the body, which can manifest itself in different, and unpleasant ways from there on out.
Here, take a look at this video below:
Though most probably a re-enactment, and a tad corny for my personal liking, the message to take away is this:
The stuttering and stammering is a result of blocking out, or suppressing his initial negative emotions. And only until they are addressed, and diffused years later, can he finally overcome the barriers of his own torment.
Surely, this is likely an extreme example, but the trick is to positively empower ourselves through our negative thinking and emotions.
What the F**k does that Even mean?!
It means feeling your shit out!
All of it too. All of the nitty-gritty, shitty feeling bullshit! You know, all that painful shit. Feel the f**k out of it!Feel it in flow with your energy, and then diffuse it in a positive and constructive manner.
But, to be more polite in three words, or less:
Acknowledge, Accept, Replace.
Negative Thinking Behind closed doors
Personally speaking, I can get so bound up and angry for any whichever reason. And yes, sometimes these emotions become overwhelming enough where I emotionally feelthe need to physically lash out, or slap the first person to look at me funny!
“What the f**k are you looking at asshole?”
Look, life is all over the place sometimes, and emotional moments like that are of often unclear, and their reasons are unbeknownst.
There is no sense to pretend that we feel a certain way when we don’t feel that way at all.
Thankfully, I can recognize that these tensions exist within myself and are often secondary to what I need to address. These emotions are reacting to something other, in which case we must identify the source, or at best, we must try to.
In saying that, I also need to diffuse them through myself. And though I may feel the urge to lash out and slap someone, the best solution is to avoid taking any action in slapping that random stranger who happened to stare into my insecurities.
That will only snowball into bigger problems, and potentially, a lifetime of regret.
So what is the trick here?
Doing nothing won’t help you much either. We still need to address that emotional need to express ourselves physically as a result of the moment.
We diffuse the emotion by constructively diffusing it.
In this case, swing a damn bat, or a prop of some sort! PHYSICALLY live out your frustrations by swinging it wildly through the air!
I know, it sounds crazy and weird, right?
“That’s your solution? Swing a damn bat?!”
Yea, definitely!
We are all crazy weird, and we all need to express that side of ourselves openly, but constructively.
A tamer example IN JUDGING OTHERS.
Most of us have been taught, or heard with repetition:
“YOU BE NICE, YOU HEAR?!”
“What goes around, comes around!”
“Be grateful to yourself and others!”
Again, it is great advice, and I purposely try to practice selflessness often. However, there are days where someone may happen to stumble into my life where everything about this person completely repulses me.
Growing up with the “You be nice!” ideology, I actively try to find good qualities in this person, or humble down their “unlikable” qualities.
But in trying to treat them in kind, there is so much more tension than just accepting the initial emotional response, and rolling with the fact that I kind of hate everything about them.
Look man, I hate your f**king face, and your stupid mannerisms!
Get the f**k away from me, you stupid douche asshole!
When I do happen to recognize these emotions, I still try to take the same “baseball bat”approach.
Constructive diffusion is key To Negative Thinking!
So I try to practice saying what I really feel like saying, I just do so in my own head.
“I thought this was a tame example? That just sounds crazier, twisted, and more dysfunctional.”
Yeah, it’s crazy and weird, and I am dysfunctional as f**k! But again, we all have our own unique dysfunctions.
So go ahead and try it for yourself. It might actually make you happier by bringing a smile or chuckle to your face, in which case you are now experiencing a moment of happiness.
You see how that works? The offending qualities may now be somehow more tolerable.
It is a form of constructive diffusion, and can take you from a firm feeling of:
“You sh**y bastard! You f**k!”
To a mere:
“Bro, you suck.”
Feel Better?
I am no master at diffusing my emotions, and this isn’t a cure-all to your emotional pitfalls. But, it is a practice.
Go on, get creative in your own practice to thwart the creative bullshit your mind is busy conjuring up trying to thwart your happiness.
Practice cleaning out the gunk and sh*t from your soul!
Practice it often, let yourself feel your own sh*t, and feel it fully.
Believe it or not, acknowledging and expressing your own negative thinking is therapeutic in this way. It is a way to purge our own bullsh*t.
The power behind this negativity, is learning how to sort through your emotions when you are feeling down, this way you can relish on the high of feeling high when the cycle is making its way around again.
In practicing the optimistic diffusion, through the pessimism and gloom, and never suppressing it,
The creative exploit as a lazy alternative to the rat race, means instigating the fight between irregularity and normality. And while you’re out fighting normal:
Test yourself, test nature, test the faith. That’s what living is all about!
The Rat Race And The Creative Alternative
There is work, and then there is work.
Someone looking from the outside in can be so quick to pass judgment. It is socially common, at least here in the west, to be defined instantly by what we do for a living.
Quite usually, this is implied through what we do for work. Your working life is everything that your everyday life stands for. It is everything people use to work you down into a nutshell. After all, we are what we are consumed by.
The Three Types
The way in which you spend your time for compensation is what makes or breaks you, socially speaking.
In this, I like to separate people into 3 different working classes:
1. Employers
Employers, or people who found obvious success on their own terms. These are people who are praised, and glorified. These people are excused from such terms as real job, or real work because it is automatically assumed considering that the money earned here, speaks for itself.
2. Employees
Employees, or people who are directly working as an employee/trading their time for someone else’s dream in some manner. These people are deemed admirable, respectable, and honest. These people exemplify the typical hard-working stereotype. This is also the classic definition for what work really is. The intense effort sustained in the longevity of a career, exchanging compensation for one’s time. This is work, because people work hard for their money. Most people live here.
3. Transitioning Workforce
Transitioning workforce, this is what I call everyone else who doesn’t fit into either of the above two categories. Quite typically, they are on the cusp of falling into one, or the other. While transitioning, these people can be scrutinized as lazy, or lost. The hassle here is that they aren’t engaging with real jobs. The reason being, a) They haven’t made a lot of money yet, or b) They aren’t choosing to exchange their time for compensation, in committing their life to another’s strange dream.
Pipe Dreams
In pursuit of my own creative exploits, I feel I fall into this transitioning workforce. Categorically speaking, I am usually on the verge of breaking even or going broke, a true starving artist.
Regardless of the situation, people on the outside looking in always cultivate such scrutiny towards those who find themselves in similar situations.
But before I go any further, I want to note on how I am cultivating a very biased opinion in these experiences here.
Nevertheless, here are some of the personal examples to touch up on to showcase what fighting normal really means in our effort to escape the rat race:
The Rat Race: “Get a real job.”
No.
I had a real job, a very lucrative one at that for my standards, but I gave it up.
I left for several reasons, predominantly because of the endless existential crises that kept surfacing for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the experience and what it did do for me. But I had to leave, to respect my personal callings.
But Let me ask you:what is a real job, and what are the standards that make it so.
Everything we do on this plane of existence has been fabricated by the men and women here.
Technically, AÂ real job is something people do in place of what we were going to do anyways, which is…
To fill time.
Regardless of what we strive for, the clock continues to tick away steadily. In that fact, time is also just another conceptualization of moveable moments.
“Well you should seek it out, to get a good job, to work for a good source of income.”
If it’s not a financial suffering, it will be something else; It always is.
Fighting normal is a choice to make away from the rat race. So, ill take my chances by choosing to opt out of the 35 year status quo to chase those cushy pensions, or some other emotional security blanket.
Not to take away from the typical working lifestyle, or to make it out as a “wrong choice”, But what sticks me most, is when people project that path as the only path, or that I am delusional in trying to find a pleasurable alternative.
Fighting Normal: “You Lazy bastard.”
“You’re lazy, you don’t want to work like everybody else. You have terrible work ethic, you Quitter!”
I grew up a grunt, and I put A LOT of hard work into a lot of things. Contrary to that fact, I also put VERY LITTLEÂ effort into a lot of other things.
This is what sacrifice is all about, and it doesn’t mean there is a lack of work ethic solely on the fact that an individual is not holding onto a “real job”, let alone has nothing to show for themselves.
It’s not a lack of work ethic, it’s simply a sacrifice to apply a strong work ethic elsewhere.
This is sacrifice,and we all do it day in and day out, on many different levels.
Escape the Rat Race: “Chase Your Passion.”
Calling someone lazy, or knocking their work ethic right off the bat is sheer ignorance. Furthermore, a ‘bad’ work ethic is usually the symptom of one thing, a lack of passion.
Go ahead, it’s easy to call someone lazy for opting out of the typical 40-hour, 9 to-5 lifestyle. But chances are, that a person who is projecting this laziness to another person who is seeking alternative paths, is usually well immersed within that typical 40-hour grind themselves.
If you’re miserable, it’s not our fault that you’re miserable. And honestly, anyone can play this ignorant game.
I can harp on you for any number of reasons, for a lack of commitment somewhere else along the lines of your life. Though it may not be for your working life, perhaps I can harp on your failed relationships as a lazy spouse. Or potentially on your physical health, as a lazy glutton, or dig on other irrelevant facts about your life.
I could very simply project the MY OWN life importance onto yours and find lack there:
“You’re wasting your time. You could have been doing some real work, YOU could be the one writing this 5000+character rant! Instead, you were too busy with your childish 40-hour work week… YOU LAZY F**KER!”
Perspective is a funny thing.
I wouldn’t say that to you, but I could if I believed it strongly enough.
People fail to see it, and they fail to see it often. Or maybe they do, and just don’t give a damn; Both equally viable concepts.
Regardless, it’s a petty, and childish game that we can play here. And realistically, I would never question anyone’s work ethic, or argue with anyone’s life choices/circumstances under these ridiculous circumstances.
The point I am trying to make, is that a person’s argument relative to another’s work ethic can quickly fall short if you take into consideration that this scrutiny is simply a comparison of priority.
My own priorities, aren't your priorities... they could very well be, but priorities can differ greatly from person to person. Your priority may very well be committing to a 40 hour work week, and my 40 hours goes to however the hell I want to spend it.
Secondly, a person’s work ethic should never be questioned over their choice to participate.
There are plenty of people out there that make for terrible workers,and this is simply because they lack passion in whatever it is they are doing. Which is all the more reason to seek an alternative path in the first place.
I can’t fathom it, how most people can be so miserable, but constantly suppress it…“Oh, butit pays the bills”, how excusable.
Regarding the latter, sometimes an alternative to the rat race is simply seeking opportunities of fulfillment to stray away from such lethargic circumstances.
Give up the dream: “Embrace the rat race.”
A dream is anything other than the grind, where chasing an alternative to the rat race is fantastical. Likewise, where we invest a lot of time without any immediate reward, we are easily instructed to give it up.
Chasing your dream is such a funny concept.
Most people will support it when it’s just a thought out there in space. But as soon as you start to put it to practice, there are very few and very specific people left to urge you through it.
And, if it isn’t rewarding you quick enough, well guess what, it’s time to quit, to get a real job.
You hear it time in, and time out as the most successful people develop that trait.
It is tempting to give into their failures, but their success was found in their opposition to it. No matter how arguable it was to give up on their dreams, successful people found their way through a persistent rebellion.
You only have a lifetime to make your dreams a reality. If you don’t focus on your dreams, what else is left to pursue, outside of an underactive imagination.
Rat Race: “You Must think about your future.”
I totally agree, which is why I made these choices, and why I continue to make them.
I am not sitting here impulsively living my life, I’m purposefully fighting normal over here. And just because I am not collecting steady paychecks, doesn’t warrant that I am not pursuing some purpose, or intention.
In fact, I am constantly thinking about my future, and I intend to find my real purpose.
Our perspectives just differ:
“Get and keep a good job. Save money, retire, live off what I made over the past 35 year routine, and don’t forget to collect that pension.”
VERSUS:
Well, a lot can happen in 35 years. And, I would rather feed my questions for experiences in this world now, than to purposely chase a career down only to go back on my original feelings down the road.
Maybe my expectations are skewed, but I want to do it now, and I want to do it later too. If I have no money from my exploits then either, well at least I did something right in making it that far.
On Potential’s Death Bed
People fear suffering, loss, and death. In avoidance, we absorb ourselves in such realities to live such comfortable lives.
All the more reason to escape the rat race, to start fighting normal, because comfort comes with its own set of problems. It brings complacency, apathy, and guess what else… Death; Both physically, and symbolically.
We become so comfortable in our own comforts, that we lose touch with our personal growth.
It then becomes harder to let go of everything we worked for, because we spent so much time working for the things we think we wanted. As we near our own physical demise, which was taking place all along since our birth –duh, we begin to question the very thing we tried to avoid in the first place when we sold our soul for that shitty career; for that real job.
I’d like to think that I am trying to face up to those questions now. And if I’m the one that’s wrong, ill gladly admit to be the asshole here. Either way, I will never have any regrets as to how I spent my life because the risk of failure is something to accept every single day.
So be it in abundance as a result of my creative endeavors, or penniless, which is also a result of my creative endeavors, the truth here lies in the fact that I have complete responsibility in the way my life plays out.
I am responsible for both the choices I made, and the choices I didn’t.
“Fight On.”, Forget The Rat Race
Go on, start fighting normal for yourself. Shun The rat race.
We are resilient beings living in a clusterf**ked world.
We have lost ourselves through the industrialization, as we have added more layers of complexity to simplest things. Deep down, we are still agrarian beings who overcomplicated our basic needs by adding more prerequisites to achieve them.
It’s the nature of the beast I guess, but still, we must seek to test ourselves as OUR OWN SELVES, and not as the product of a social whole that is misguided and lost.
Don’t Just Work Hard, Work Smart Too!
Life is work, and fighting normal is a gamble.
I find that playing into the grind of the rat race is hard work, but it’s not necessarily smart work. With that in mind, I’ll take my chances by intelligently investing my hard work ethic into smarter work.
In any case, I’ll either find success, or starve myself trying to find it.
Or maybe, I’ll find satiety in swallowing my pride down the road for sustenance.
Test nature, Test the faith, Test yourself– F**K– THAT’S LIVING!
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