Expository Excogitation

Its a peculiar thing how questioning everything has a propensity to lead a person to a place where they trust nothing.

It might be an overly cynical worldview, this impulse to distrust the actions and motives of others... but maybe its based on what I perceive to be a general tendency for people to not say what they really mean and avoid openly dealing with things they stubbornly find meaningful where others do not.

Perhaps one of the greatest fears I've noticed of late is the fear of awkwardness. That uncertainty of how things will unfold in a given situation provided certain details of past encounters and unspoken knowledge. I must admit, perhaps this fear is only in myself and I'm merely projecting. Still, observations must be made.

It seems to me the essential anxiety of humanity is uncertainty. This condition, of not knowing, of not understanding, this sense of being lost - its symptoms are constantly exacerbated by the confluence of pressures placed upon the modern mind. It takes that which should be embraced and relegates it to a signifier of ineptitude. A disease for which there is no excuse; whose etiology rests solely in the failings of personal wit or will. There is no excuse for ignorance in the age of Google and Wikipedia, just as there is no excuse for idleness in the age of Capitalism.

Yet the terrifying fact that many of us do not know where or who we are in this carousel of distractions continues to compel us to "find ourselves"

Some turn to drugs. Others turn to school. Some seek meaningful employment. A new house, a car, friendship, a comfortable lifestyle, an acetic existence, spirituality - all seeking some sort of reference point, an action or perspective or sequences of both that will cast light upon our actions, give our lives color. Some seek it through sex, clutching desperately to the physical manifestations of affection, as if they could reveal the ways to love. Others seek purely emotional connection, as if love is something that transcends physicality, something purely mental, the only portcullis to self-affirmation. All emphases misplaced, it seems. I do not wish to discount the attempts of those who are trying the best they can under the circumstances. Merely pointing out that tactics are not strategies.

So what's to be done? I do not claim to know answers. I am in the unfortunate position of being beset by convergent anxieties myself, uncertainty and distrust predominate. Clarity, perhaps, is the only remedy - its difficult to see the forest from the trees when you've gone into the woods and lost your way; one keeps scanning the trunks, searching for distinguishable signs of familiar territory. As the fear sets in, the mind begins to conjure up these signs, projecting them onto the things which they are not. Before long, rather than trusting one's internal sense of place in relation to the woods itself, one becomes unsettlingly lost in the pursuit of a way out. Perhaps the only answer is to settle in, and take things in stride. I'm reminded of a Rainer Maria Rilke quote:


"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

.end.