Struggle and the Playground
A hope
I started journaling as a substitute for and sometimes supplement to meditation. I would spend some time breathing and resting, letting my thoughts settle and then something would come in that felt like an uninterruptible stream of wisdom. I couldn’t shunt it away or suppress it, so I ended up just channeling it into my journal. Eventually it became unnecessary to enter the meditative state to feel the insight monologue come on in the back of my mind, I would wake up, take a few breaths and where I would have had racing thoughts a few years ago about the various obligations in life I have failed to fulfill, I’d instead hear a very clear voice laying out plans, affirmations and hope for a new life that began with this new day.
Some of it feels like hearing the Suprabhatam in the morning as a child in Hyderabad. Some of it feels like hearing my family already awake and chatting about the world when I was a teenager desperately trying to sleep more.
Thinking out loud
I think journaling is no longer doing for me what it used to. I find myself wanting to share my thoughts more openly and with less editing. Maybe I’m less ashamed by what’s coming out these days, maybe I’m feeling overwhelmed by the weight of the questions, I feel I can no longer simply talk to myself about these things. I have to do something different.
Plugging into a bigger nervous system
I have been reading a lot about the electrical grid recently - specifically around how one turns up and down the voltage to trade off transmission losses for safety.
I think for a long time I was a power source that was difficult to plug into the grid. Mostly because I am, like many other humans, not merely a power source all the time. Sometimes I pull from the grid and other times I have a lot to give back. But the grid infrastructure doesn’t really know how to handle such a thing.
If you try putting water back up your tap you’ll end up mostly spilling it down the sink. I was doing that for much of my life - trying to plug my energy in and push it into the much larger nervous system of humanity. I was frustrated because I felt I had so much to give. I don’t know that I actually did, but I certainly felt that way.
I had to take from humanity first before I could start giving back. I also had to find people around me who can pulse in different ways from me. Enough of us hooked into series and we can keep a pretty consistent voltage, I think.
Returning to the playground
I now have faith that I can sustainably work and give back to the world. I even relish the idea that I can work for the next 30 years. To work and to be plugged into the larger system of human productivity doesn’t feel like a drain or a test. It feels more like a playground.
How did I get here? Money was definitely a big aspect of it. I feel financially secure in this phase of my life. Even if the worst things happen, I know that I can live for years off of my savings. Decades if we move to a cheaper area of the world than San Francisco.
Money gave me freedom, optionality. I can now walk away from good ideas and wait until a truly great idea can come along and smack me on the face.
I’ve also reached a seniority in my career that lets me express myself through more avenues than code. I am a coach at times, a cop other times, a pair programmer, a rubber duck when the situation calls for it.
But I had money ten years ago, I didn’t feel even a third of this. The seniority showed up about 5 years ago but I didn’t recognize it then. I was mostly held back from seeing the playground by my own incredibly negative perceptions of the world.
Escape from Bloomfield
At a conversation at work recently, I put out a number I’m not entirely sure of - that of my high school class of 500+, about 25 of us have already passed on.
I don’t know that this is true for sure, but it feels pretty accurate. I can think of at least one person who I would have called a friend who passed on a few years ago. I have no real way of mapping all this out, but I don’t think we have to get caught up on the veracity of this. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that 17 years after high school, 10% of my classmates are dead.
Bloomfield was a suburb of Newark, but also had a lot of wealthy areas. It was diverse in a lot of ways - race, religion, ethnicity, income. There were really good programs for computer science education and there were also occasional massive fights that would break out on the front steps. No one would be surprised to hear that someone got jumped walking near Grove Street light rail station. I, in fact, did get jumped once walking near the Grove Street light rail station. I honestly don’t know if the guy who jumped me had a knife or was just faking, but he took my sixteen dollars and dropped the wallet on the ground.
I have a lot of frustrating, scary and sad memories of Bloomfield. I have very few happy ones. Most of those happy ones are with my high school friends. Though of course, friends too have their difficult periods. There are a few frustrating and sad memories with them as well.
All of this left me with an impression of the world. That it was a fundamentally unsafe and unpredictable place. Sure, there were highs but there were also lows that seemed like they never ended.
Recovering from this New Jersey perspective into a Californian good vibes dude was something I resisted for decades. Wouldn’t it be dishonest to forget that, wouldn’t I be abandoning the me that suffered all those years under the weight and stress of ambient fear?
It’s certainly one way to think about it. I just don’t think those are questions worth answering any more. There is no abandoning of the old me, he’s always there in me. There is no dishonesty in forgetting, only humanity. There is nothing more valuable than cherishing life and we honor the struggle of the past with our present joy. We prepare for the joy of the future by struggling today.
The Struggler
Berserk is a very good manga. It is extremely brutal and I would not recommend it unless you have a high tolerance for gore, violence and emotional destruction.
Mild spoilers follow.
The main character is called “the struggler” by various other characters through the series. He struggles every night. He battles demons and then has to find rest and strength during the day to battle them again the next night. His journey is one powered by a powerful grief and loss that he transmuted into hatred and rage. He is at his most powerful when he dons a self-mutilating armor that feeds on his rage. The “Berserker” armor.
This is how a lot of people live though. They avoid grief, they turn it into a powerful energy source that burns through the body as it burns everyone around. They struggle, alone, against their demons every night. They seek rest in the day, but it doesn’t come.
The struggler finally finds allies again. And once he does, he is able to heal. He is plugged into a smaller collective nervous system than the whole human one, he heals there and slowly regains his ability to be wholly human again.
This feels like my journey, and I think many other Berserk readers feel the exact same way.
Optional Struggle
My parents are both approaching 75 and I truly wish they live to 100. I understand why people get obsessed with life extension around my age. It’s hard to see your parents slow down and get sleepier. Sometimes, it seems their very frames seem to be toppling over with the weight of all they’ve carried in life.
But they both seem to have more fire and verve mentally than ever before. Perhaps mentally is the wrong word. Spiritually, perhaps. They’re as committed to their ideals, their ways of being. Akira Kurosawa, upon receiving his Oscar said:
I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.
He was 83 at the time. Instead of sending out a jaded and “cool” quote about how he feels that all of film has been little more than piss on the garbage fire of the world, Kurosawa admits that even at 83 he has only just begun to tap into the possibilities of the human imaginal realm. I stole this quote from a rather good blog post about living a creative life which quotes Scorcese quoting Kurosawa.
If he could, I think he would have chosen to struggle for decades more to make more films. But that’s the important part - he would have chosen. He would have opted for the struggle. If someone just dropped 225 pounds onto my back right now and asked me to stand up, I would be horrified and traumatized. But I regularly pay money to someone to do exactly that. The option, the consent, the freedom to engage and disengage, this is what makes a nightmare into an adventure.
Legacy
As I say all of this about consent, optionality, freedom, I will also admit I am a massive hypocrite. I want to bring children into this world and nurture them into healthy adults. I believe it is the most important thing I can do with my life. I don’t think the struggle the next generation will inherit is one that they will have consented to, nor will they have the option or freedom to disengage from it.
What we will leave to them is a legacy, a slightly different one from the one given to us by our parents. It is something they can in some ways choose to take on fully or reject partially but for the most part it is an unavoidable burden that comes from being born into this world. We make the best of that burden and in the spaces between struggle and sleep we build more for those who come after us. We thank those who came before us.