Aug 07, 2005 19:22
i went in search of my father today. i drifted around the corners of burnside, spaces laden with the homeless and downtrodden. i knocked on the door to the mission but no one answered. i was mistaken for someone 'lookin to score,' drugs, sex...anything. i kept walking and eventually powells pulled me into its pregnant belly. i didn't find my dad today. but instead, i found my self-will. sometimes i lose these things; like focus, like will, like raison d'etre. dreary, worrisome, purposeless days of leisure, i relax, relax, relax, it doesn't make me happier. i will be glad to fill my time once again. i have the inclination to overfill it, to get a second job, to take evening classes, to set schedules and follow them. to let the pendulum swing the other way for awhile before it settles somewhere in the middle.
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i dispise self-help books and life coaching sessions and empowerment rhetoric. i say, never trust anyone who claims to have all the answers. it's odd, i steer clear of all this how-to/self-betterment bullcrap and yet pour over books on astrology and pop psych stuff like handwriting analysis and personality tests. probably because i'm not interested in perfecting or restricting. i'm interested in acknowledging and accepting oneself and others. not that i don't think change, real self-change is possible. on the contrary, i strongly believe in the human capacity for profound change. but having someone tell you the "right" way to live your life won't make that happen. foremost you have to truly believe there is a problem with the patterns in your life and you have to want to change them. not because you think it will make you happier but because you want to change how you identify yourself. the reason habits are so hard to change is because our habits make up a huge percentage of our identity. if we are what we repeatedly do, changing what we repeatedly do, is in fact changing core aspects of how we see ourselves and our relationship to the world. for example, if you want to quit smoking. it's not enough to want to quit the habit, you have to actually want to identify yourself as a non-smoker with all the various sub-text that entails. habits aren't taken on arbitrarily, they are elements of how we want to live, who we want to be. change the macro first and the micro will follow. we know all the answers ourselves anyway, its just a matter of accessing them.
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yoni says it's impossible to talk about the present. that all conversation is either a reference to the past, a thought, an emotion, a shared experience or an inference to the future; plans, dreams, theories. and because the present doesn't really exist..( in the sense of every moment leading up to the present moment is the past and each moment yet to arrive is the future)... analyzing the present is a moot endeavor. i told him, i would have to think about that one.
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yoni is beautifully irreverent and i have decided to quote him on somewhat regular basis. so my yoni quote for the week is:
"Palestine is really not all that."
philosophy,
thoughts