https://youtu.be/udAL48P5NJU

— § —

How much does it matter?

(1) Integrity: Do what you do well, according to the standards that matter to you. Other peoples’ standards are other peoples’ business; when you reach the end, you will answer to yourself, not to them.

(2) Journey: Work to improve what you do, not just how you do it. Continuing to find where and when to act is as important, if not more important, than knowing how to act.

(3) Stamina: Grit your teeth. Allow yourself to suffer if necessary in order to do the right thing. You are mortal. All suffering is temporary. But history is not. Your actions and decisions are forever. Put other people first and you’ll be able to live with yourself—and not be alone. Put yourself first and you’ll be alone—and unable to live with yourself.

(4) Wisdom: Allow things to be what they are. Don’t try to make the simple complex; don’t try to make the complex simple; don’t try to make the small large; don’t try to make the large small. Don’t fight reality.

(5) Knowledge: Force yourself to ask and to see what things are, including yourself. Yes, change is part of the fabric of life, but refusing to see things as they are makes right action impossible. Refusing to see yourself as you are makes doing right by yourself impossible. See what is, then embrace it. Otherwise, you yourself and everything you do become fiction.

(6) Patience and alertness: Make peace with time, and cooperate with it. Time must be your friend, since it is the substance of your existence. Time is also your enemy, since it will someday end your existence. Either way, it is more powerful than you. Of all the facets of reality, time is the one that you can fight least successfully. Follow time’s lead in all things. Understand this or face failure on every other count above.

(7) Perspective: Realize that a life is an aggregate, not a moment; you will not live it all at once. Continue when you fail. Redouble your efforts. Paradoxically, this includes your effort to accept things as they are, both yourself and others.

— § —

“To understand everything is to forgive everything.”

— § —

(8) Acceptance: The world is not just and it never will be. You will not be dealt with “fairly” because the nature of your existence, in a world with endings, living a life that will end, is unfair. You cannot save anyone. You cannot save yourself. You cannot “repair” anyone. You cannot “repair” yourself. There’s no point in demanding reparations because they repair nothing—nothing that has passed can be changed; nothing can be “repaired” once it is done. To fight this battle on these terms is to spend a lifetime striking out at shadows, only to realize at the end that you have missed everything that you might have had in the time that you were here. Learn from each moment, embrace it, then move on to the next.

In the last eight months I’ve only managed to run one incremental backup to DLT.

This is not good. I know where this leads. This leads to me losing precious data—photographs, writing, work, etc.

I need to pull myself together, get up the motivation to do some data cleanup, and then run a backup. I have been down this road too many times to not know better.

— § —

I have another bunch of stuff that needs to be sold on eBay. I need to pull myself together and get this done, too.

There is no point in having things sitting around losing value when I can use the clams.

In general, there are more than a couple non-pressing, “needs to be done,” “pull myself together” tasks on the list that ought to be attended to. I know better. I need to respect myself and reality enough to move muscles and make them happen.

— § —

Most of the time I go along through life doing my best and making the sense I can of things, staying relatively stable (all things considered) in the face of the state of sheer bizarreness that is being a person.

But like a kind of subterranean heartbeat, I periodically have these stretches of down-ness, like everyone. They tend to last a few hours, at worst a couple of days. They suck. In these moments, the full force of everything that is a risk in my life, of everything that I have ever lost, of my age, and of my trajectory as a human being tend to overtake and obscure other thoughts. I know that this is happening, in general, so I can mitigate against it and continue on as normal. But the experience is not a pleasant one.

Often it starts in the middle of the night; I’ll wake up without remembering any particular dream but feeling vaguely panicked and desperate, with no particular remedy at hand and the distinct awareness that my mind is playing tricks on me. After all, I went to bed in no particular trouble, maybe even completely happy, and nothing new has happened over the course of the few hours that I’ve slept.

Rationalizing helps me to keep on keeping on, and to avoid giving in to wild impulses toward control and action that used to plague me, say, when I was in my twenties.

Still, it’s not comfortable.

I don’t suppose too many people have ever arrived at the condition of having no particular downs in life, just ups. I’d like to get there someday. Mine aren’t too bad—again, all things considered—in that they don’t leave me incapacitated and they only last a few hours to maybe a day or three. But life would be better, and I would be so much more, without them.

It’s nearly April.

April. May. June. And then—July.

Before too long, it will be a year. Time continues, in many ways, to stand still, though I know it shouldn’t and mustn’t. But a year!

What will I do on that day? How will I handle it?

— § —

There’s a good reason for the way in which society hesitates to allow young people too much responsibility, and for the way in which it considers twenty-somethings and even thirty-somethings to be “young people.”

The reason is that no matter how well-developed and how experienced you believe yourself to be throughout early adulthood, you simply haven’t had time to have learned the hard lessons until you have arrived in your late thirties and forties.

You still throw your hands up and hope. You are still naive. You are still in denial. You still think—and this is a big one—that time is on your side, and ergo, that reality is on your side.

People say that you gain “experience” as you go, but the less euphemistic way to put this is that it’s not until your late thirties or forties that you’re so tired of fuckups and suffering, and so aware of the fact that you’re running out of chances, that you finally begin to get things right.

You could have done it all along, but you just didn’t. Because how bad could it be? How wrong can it go? How many times can it go bad? You need those years to be shown that it can always be worse, it can go ever more wrong, and it can and will go bad every single time you get a little complacent.

— § —

Last year I was excited for, and hopeful about, spring. This year I’m not. I regret that this post is such a downer, but the fact is that today, tonight, I am wishing that spring had simply never arrived. I’m not ready for it and I don’t want to be ready for it.

That goes double for summer.

But reality is what it is.

— § —

Meanwhile, the weeks and months continue to sail by.

I have to cut this out.