The Philosopher's Attic

I find it hard to imagine anything scarier in real life (as opposed to zombies or other imaginary, otherworldly horrors such as clowns) than taking your own advice. Particularly when said advice comes from rational thought and ideals of the philosophical mind rather than experience. As with anything what we think is best in general is rarely what we end up doing. If we did, maybe things in this world would look a bit differently.

I did take my own advice. The one from the very last post in this blog. It explains the long silence between articles. I’ve made the change and it’s been quite the ride so far. And no, I haven’t had any regrets. And I truly doubt that they might still come.

I’ve accepted a new job, in a new town, and with that chose two things completely out of my comfort zone: we moved to Zürich, and I chose to work in a field I only have marginal knowledge of.
While for some that may be a step down from the career that I have built for myself, for me it’s a time out. A much needed moment of fresh air, new acquaintances, new things to learn, old things to see from a completely new perspective and finally a new level of knowledge about myself and waht I am actually able to achieve.

Changing life, be it radically or a little less drastic, isn’t something that can be achieved in a single decisions. Most of the times we are dependent on other people’s choices around us and on all these small things that make up set tapestry of life. But like the unravelling of your favourite winter sweater or the famous saying about the wings of a butterfly, all it takes is action at the right spot. Funnily enough, the writers of the Expanded Universe of Star Wars call the theory behind such a technique “shatter point”. And that’s just what it is. Every change is destructive in its very own way and not every consequence might have been anticipiated. Just as we hadn’t planned for a pregnancy to happen (probably) the same week I was offered my new job.

Stalemate in any situation, is the worst thing that can happen to us as human beings. While I wouldn’t disagree on the fact that we all need stability and a certain kind of constant organisation to be productive and all that goes with it, I would argue that this is not a stalemate. Not being able to progress towards the person you want to be or the life you want to have, because you don’t have the job that would allow for certain changes, not being able to change said job because you’ve chosen to be good in a field that is transformed into a desert of austerity… amounts to stalemate. A vicious circle where the increasing level of cynism and emotional stress is the only sign to mark the next level on your very own path to personal hell.
Or not being able to do the changes you wish, because you can’t find either this guy, that girl or the right flat, the right car or once more the right job. Not because you don’t know what you want, but because ultimately you have no clue about the things you actually need.

Change in that respect becomes a question of life or death. Literally. Let the person you are die in that situation to become someone else that is changed by the situation or take charge of your needs and start shaping your life around them as opposed to the other way around.

Sure, one always gets by and there is no animal more gifted in finding creative ways to avoid making the hard choices and face change than humans. And even if we are quick to admit that we do live in a desert and that truly we should do things differently, we persist. We find excuses. We take our fears for granted.

And yet, all it takes is the first step.
Courage to you all to find the strength and the infantile curiousness to take a single step. My prayers and thoughts are with you.

yseult Personal, Soulfood change, communication, dare, future, trust, virtues

There is a silence that destroys you. That annihilates everything you stand for, everything you fought for, all the pains you’ve endured and that made you. This kind of silence is a rejection of everything that you are and you’ve been. It’s a weird thing that silence which is the absence of something – namely talk, speech, exchange, connection etc. – can take on such violent forms. But there are situations in life where the things unsaid reveal much more about ourselves than the ones that we actually dare or care to voice.
In this kind of silence there is no peace, there’s only conjecture, construction, frustration and ultimately loss. Without word, there can be no understanding.

But then there are those other kinds of silences and one in particular can build things so much greater than words or explanation ever could. Sometimes, the “denial of words”-silence might mutate – without any real interference – into this latter kind, we could call it new silence.
It might take years or just a few hours. But ultimately that silence, that breaking of connection might spawn a new understanding. Thankfully enough as humans, we are able to forget and even the greatest horrors in life may lose their burning pain. They certainly leave their marks and they shape as much as anything else who we are and what we dream of, but with time, they’re shifted into the backgrounds of that huge scene of our consciousness. And one day we’ll wake up and our first thought isn’t that memory that broke our hearts, or that anger that made us forget all those important lessons of charity, forgiveness and love. We simply get over it. Over and beyond. Over and past it.

That’s the precise moment where the destructive silence can take on another twist and force and turn into forgiveness. Slowly. But once we’ve achieved that, whatever deserved explanation or laying out suddenly doesn’t need anymore clarification and things just become what they are, what they were more precisely.

Sometimes, a silence is a chance. And usually, as with anything, it takes two. One to be silent and the other to accept it.

I myself have just overcome such a silence of several years where no words could overcome what needed to be processed. Where projected ideas about past and future were blocking the way and view of the truth and the facts. I’ve fought that silence, have hated it, have loathed the person subjecting me to it, because of their inability to see me, hear me and accept me. And that silence has broken my heart on many occasions because I was forced into it. Because there was no ear, no possibility, no heart to listen.

And then one day, I just moved on. Laid it down at the altar of all sacrifices and got on with life. Not truly thinking that such things could indeed be overcome. Not for me. Redemption was for others. Or rather I didn’t trust myself to really get over it. I thought that something would always remain of that unspeakable pain.
Experiences and prayers later, suddenly there it was again, that thought that maybe, just maybe … or not? For years, it went on like that. Until one final day, the silence was no more. Without force or willing, but with a gentle turn of fates, suddenly the words flowed and whatever we thought needed saying suddenly had no power over us anymore.

Sometimes, a silence builds new things without us even noticing, without us even consciously working on doing it. Sometimes, those silences are bought with the pain of years past and sometimes what they build is a new house for our soul to live in.

yseult Personal, The Human Mind communication, Issues, silence

I’ve already made a point for caring, to extend our own lowly existence wider into circles around us. But what about the other direction. It’s an old idea that everything in this world is realised in a split between object and subject.

We are all subjects, thinking, feeling, breathing, crying and laughing our way through our existence. But to everyone around us, we’re another object in a world that’s just getting fuller and fuller.
Care for another and make him a subject of your affection. But what happens when you’re being cared for and made a true subject of someone’s affection, love and friendship?

It’s possibly one of the hardest things to achieve: let yourself be cared for.

In times where we’re being tought to stand on our own two feet from a tender age, where being independent and self-sufficient, we’ve completely lost the notion of accepting anybody’s help. The idea that we need others in order to get better, be better, get more complete, be more complete has something revolting. Completely out of touch with the modern world and the idea that yes, man is an island and that every man can fight for themselves.

Accepting the care of others isn’t so much a dependency or a disguised profiteurism that only lets you consider others in their worth or what they can do for you. That’s just another way of being self sufficient and using anything and everything that you can for your own gain.
No, what I’m driving at here is the fundamental truth of ‘seeing me through your eyes makes me fuller’.

As someone who had to very early on understand the terrible distance between me and the world and my own incapacity to ‘connect’ or blend in, it’s been the biggest change in myself and my not-so-funny automatisms of auto-derogation to accept that there are people caring for me and that them doing something for me, caring for me helps me be better, fight less to be oh-so-awesome and by admitting to liking it, actually learn to care for others more.

Letting yourself be cared for by others, on their own terms instead of your own, can offer new perspectives. Accepting help, accepting their view of you, of your needs and their ways of meeting them, is not just about you, but about them as well and about what links you to the rest of the world.

yseult Personal communication, friendship, love, mind, society, vices