“Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.” They mislead you by making you think it’s possible to describe concretely a feeling that defies description. Your feeling impels you to write words. Someone else reads them. They make him feel a certain way. It is a different feeling from what you feel. The words have interfered because by bestowing an illusion of precision they have made you think you’ve communicated something that you have not. Or you realize they have failed to communicate your message, which frustrates you. They are the building blocks of reasoned argument. But their potential uses span far beyond that, and when they are used for other purposes they almost imply that reason can infiltrate those purposes, that reason can infiltrate emotion, that reason can penetrate feeling: that it can solve any problem. You regret some things you say. You get upset over what someone else doesn’t say. It’s rare that there are those ideal moments when you say just what you want to say and hear said just want you want to hear said and even then the moment is fleeting and before you know if you’ve said too much or too little and there are you are back where you were. Not that that realization stops you from wanting the cold comfort of those moments nonetheless.
But words are all we have. Real life is an imperfect whole composed of imperfect parts and the sooner you make peace with that the better things are for all involved. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a bigger, closer family? Wouldn’t it be nice to have made it to Harvard? Wouldn’t it be nice to be stronger and thinner? Wouldn’t it have been nice to realize certain things sooner? To not have wasted so much time on someone who you didn’t even realize you loved; to not have spent so much time apologizing for things that weren’t your fault; to have ensured that everything you did was, at least in some way, for yourself or for someone else that matters rather than a faceless entity who could quickly spit you out at a moment with little to show for lots of effort.
It’s hard to know what to make of that. Do you still strive for perfection while realizing it is unattainable? The answer has to be yes or at least has to be that you don’t give up completely and never try so that you never fail. Is it right to say it’s always unattainable? And does it even matter? What is perfection anyway? Does it even exist? Certainly there are many ways to make mistakes — mistakes which have the benefit of teaching you what not to do in the future. But the existence of wrong doesn’t imply the existence of right. Most things are shades of grey rather than black and white. But some shades are better and worse, not just different.
From where does the tendency to dwell on something you can’t change originate? The grown-up thing to do is to take as given what is given and proceed from there. Acting like a grown-up doesn’t automatically follow being a grown-up. If only it did.
Not knowing makes the future both exciting and terrifying. As time goes on uncertainty diminished because you can collect data points that allow you to compare past expectations with past results, to see how well you predicted the outcome, and to adjust future predictions accordingly. But when there’s no past data and thus no frame of reference the uncertainty can be crippling. Or invigorating.
What would life be if we knew the outcome ahead of time? If things were pre-ordained and we were mere actors reciting lines in a script it would be awful. It’s why I don’t believe in fate. At best, the concept of fate suggests that there is a script out there somewhere but we don’t know about it or haven’t read through the whole thing before starting to play it out again. That can’t be right but it suggests our choices are meaningless. The world is too complicated and human lives too intertwined for things to work that way. Belief if fate is disbelief in yourself. It excuses inaction. If things are bound to turn out the same way regardless of what we do, then why do anything? With no chance of failure, what’s the joy in success? At least when you feel pain you know you’re alive. “We took risks, we knew we took them, things have come out against us, therefore we have no cause for complaint.” Precisely.
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