Decisions and Failure

Decisions are scary. Even more so if your convictions are not that strong. I sometimes envy people who block out the world when making decisions and only think about themselves. Granted that being so self-centered might not be the best way to live life but it cuts through such huge amounts of bull shit that you almost start to think that it’s worth it. The absolute clarity one must have if there is only one variable to consider in every decision – Priceless!

Unfortunately, I am not wired that way. I tend to bring the whole universe under consideration while making decisions which leads to a very unpleasant milkshake of my brain. What I am slowly starting to learn is that you have to decide your priorities. Expectations are bound to collide and there are only so many points of view you can factor into your decisions so you have to let go of everything else. Caring, is a privilege that should not be offered to every Tom, Dick and Harry. It’s OK to be nice but not at the expense of personal happiness.

And when you have almost convinced yourself to put your personal happiness near the top of your priorities, the specter of failure rears its ugly head. Again failure is a curious phenomenon. On the one hand it can be an important ingredient of success and on the other it can be the biggest blocker to innovation and experimentation. 

From a personal point of view, failure made me realize that things can go wrong – horribly at times. You lose the feeling of invincibility and some teenage enthusiasm. The important thing is to not stay down but learn, adjust and experiment – wishful thinking. In the real world, without a security net you eventually lose the spark and compromise.

I might end up living a compromise – you never know. Talking (rather writing) is easy. Actually picking yourself up after every failure is much more difficult; even more scary – to keep taking risks in the face of self-doubt and failure. 

But I say to myself not yet – I can still take a little more! A few more failures, a few more bruises, a few more face down falls in the mud. Until I have exhausted the last iota of belief in my convictions I will keep looking at the world through rose tinted glasses. Here’s to learning from your mistakes and for me in particular not involving the whole universe while making decisions AND giving room to personal happiness somewhere in the decision making process.

The fight for a smile

The fight for a smile

The fight of his life

The struggle for happiness

The struggle infinite

The search for serenity

The search of a fool

On a black night

In an empty world

On a winding road

A mad man alone

In the wrong time

Among related strangers

Trying to protect

A fool’s hope

With no clue

And a forsaken belief

In the shades of grey

Looking for black or white

In shifting sands

With a dying wish

A life flashes

Through empty eyes

No smile

No happiness

Infinity beckons

The wandering fool

The line that divides

They always talk about lines that divide; about fine margins that differentiate. Genius and madness, ambition and stupidity, success and failure . . .

Most of us have encountered those situations where we feel the presence of such lines, taunting us to really test their limits or forever wonder – “what if”. Most of us choose to forever wonder because we lack the finesse to really define the line, to actually see it and thus we are afraid of crossing over.

That is the catch to be honest, you have to risk it. You have to risk madness to achieve genius, risk failure to be successful but there is a catch inside the catch. Some people cross so far over, so many times that you cannot call it anything other than stupidity. To top it all off they fail and fail miserably but they get up, dust themselves down and do it all over again chalking all previous failures to bad luck or someone else.

They never see the line and maybe never even feel its presence but through some misjudged notion of bravado they want to test its limits. The problem is you cannot really test the limits if you haven’t the slightest idea where the line is. And when you have to fall with these ‘perennial optimists’, every damn time it really irks. You can see it coming a million miles away but through the machinations of fate or fear of failure you are not in charge and all that is left to be done is to brace for impact.

Now for the real question, do you choose to go your own separate way or do you keep crashing with someone else. If you choose to leave then you are back to the first problem – risk failure for success. It’s all on you, no one else to take the blame; nowhere to hide with the whole world watching.

See the good thing about crashing because of someone else is that you never have to bear scrutiny. It is never your fault. No one will judge you – ah – the real reason we are afraid of pushing the limits – judgment. Very few of us are immune to what others think. There is always someone whose approval matters. Someone we want to take notice. As Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson

“That's the problem with genius, John. It needs an audience.”

But with that audience, comes the possibility of judgment and not just any kind of judgment – en masse judgment. So not only do you have to be prepared for failure itself, you have to be prepared to wear the tag as well and that tag more than anything else is what makes us stop way over on the safe side of the line. We choose to spend a life in anonymity rather than risk ridicule. You have to risk it, there is no other way.

Life

It is such a weird race, we lose ourselves in it only to realize that we were dancing amongst smoke and mirrors, we were celebrating insignificance – it is life! Better men have tried to capture its fleeting nature and its flimsy promises, I am just writing because I feel like it.

We have even tried to master it, to bend it to our will but the best of us have failed. Some of our fantasies revolve around making it last longer but invariably these fantasies also include warnings about the monotony of having no end. I have no real thoughts on the matter to be honest; its finite – deal with it.

But how do you deal with life? It is so peculiar, so intriguing and so frivolous. Just when you feel you have something concrete – whoosh – it is gone leaving you wondering. Did I ever truly get hold of it? Was it a mirage? The speed at which it moves does not really leave room for a detailed inspection. Things, events and people gain and lose meaning at an alarming rate. Dreams fade, reappear and become pointless in the space of a few breaths. Ambitions are lost in small fleeting moments.

You never really get used to it, it always feels like there is a little more time until there isn’t and you have reached the full stop of the last paragraph of your life. There is no more writing after that. Speaking of writing you can never rewrite stuff. It is all one way traffic leading to the same conclusion albeit from different paths. To be frank you hardly ever read it either because even when science says the end is near we keep searching for that one last step.

Life also offers you a plethora of perspectives and it is alarming when you start to witness and feel things that you swore you would never accept or acknowledge. I guess it is one of the many ways in which life tries to humble you and warn you. Things change and if you are not holding on to something tightly or if your choice of support is not strong enough then there is no telling where you will end up when the winds let up for a bit and if you don’t pay heed to the warning and improve your choices then each successive punch will be worse than the last until you have no more strength to fight or to stand even.

Life can be subtle, it can be brutal – it can delight you, it can destroy you. It will offer you hope then snatch it. It will almost kill you but then leave you with that faint ray of light. Life can indulge you and it can be cruel but ultimately life will always end and that is the only important thing in my opinion. To stand a chance against life, to be able to take it all on the chin and still grin, to ride the vagaries of its mood you must always keep one thing in sight, The End.

100 miles an hour

100 miles an hour, you are speeding along a road. The road goes nowhere; in fact it ends at the edge of a cliff. You compose yourself, adjust your foot on the pedal and continue. It’s not that you don’t know what’s about to come. You are as sure about the cliff as you are about day following night. It’s not a suicide attempt either. It’s just life and although it might seem that you are in control, you are not. It’s your car and it’s your foot on the pedal but that is just an illusion.

You have to fall; you need to fall because you need to move forward. There was a time when you had choices and other roads to travel but now there is just this one road; a road that ends at the precipice of a cliff. You look in the back view mirror but just to adjust your muffler. There is no point looking back now – it’s weirdly bland. You roll down the window to be greeted by the cold icy blast of the winter wind. You see your breath precipitating around you, for a split moment you forget everything. The car lurches, you hold the wheel tightly, role up the window and floor the pedal. Any minute now – there will be the familiar sinking feeling of falling freely . . .

You close your eyes as you navigate the last turn and the edge becomes visible on the horizon. You remember the first time you went cliff diving. It’s a very similar feeling – you have decided to jump but there is still that last bit of hesitancy so you close your eyes and leap. People stare at you in awe and despair, inspired by your courage but worried about your safety. There is no crowd here; it’s an empty road in the middle of nowhere. It’s just you and the car and a gaping chasm in front of you.

You feel your heart sink, you gulp and then it stops; it’s all over. You adjust your eyes to the light – it a beautiful spring with flowers everywhere. You count your body parts. You are free. There are choices and paths in front of you. You don’t even remember to look behind as you pick a path and start ambling.

So why the jump? Because you reach a point in life when the only way forward is to crash and burn. Sure the jump might not work out that well all the time but there is nothing else to do. Maybe better choices would have led you elsewhere but once you are here and there is no going back then the smart thing to do is compose yourself, adjust your muffler, navigate the last turn, close your eyes and floor the pedal . . .

I lost meaning

I lost meaning yesterday. Let me clarify. The carefully constructed picture in my head of my life was shattered. I would like to point out that this is not the first time this has happened. I was ambling towards some weird and abstract goals when suddenly there was no meaning to it all. I wish I could compare this to the rug being snatched from under your feet but in that scenario you fall on hard ground and you can begin again. When you lose meaning, there is no definite place where you can start from again. I imagine it’s like floating around in space in a suit that does not let you die and is fairly comfortable but you have nothing to do, nowhere to go, nowhere to be.

It is almost like getting a second perspective on things. You keep on doing the same things as you did before but there is no drive, no reason, and no satisfaction to be had from the accomplishment of your tasks. Interestingly enough, your actions, your responses and your gestures lose meaning. You smile because some part of your brain remembers that, smiling is the correct thing to do at the moment or rather that before you went crazy you would have smiled given the current circumstances. The problem is, for the life of me I cannot figure out the reasons hence the loss of meaning.

Everything seems different – empty. One would hope that with my history with this kind of thing, I would know by now what to do or at least be able to handle it better but every time it’s as empty and as cold as before. Sometimes it seems the intensity increases with each passing cycle.

What really drives me crazy is the silence inside my head. The cacophony of ideas, schemes and goals is no more. It is so quiet that you could hear a whisper even before it was uttered. The rainbow of colors is replaced by a dull black, the kind that wouldn’t thin or waver given a hundred years.

The outside world keeps revolving as it always did, it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore. You hear things and you see things but you cannot quite decipher them. The ability to make sense of it all is no more. Maybe the ability is there but the will is lost – I cannot be sure.

And now to the climax, the meaning comes back as surely as it goes away. If there is one thing I have learned it is that it does come back. However, that does not remove the fear that the next time it happens, I might not make it back. The real point apart from this is that, one could only lose meaning if that meaning was not completely correct. I would hope that if the meaning of all that you did was completely correct then you would not lose meaning like I do. That is what scares me the most, if it ultimately turns out that my interpretation of it all was off the mark, then would there still be enough time to make amends or would it be too late? Hell, is it already too late?

How strong will you be on your worst day?

An event recently got me to thinking. How strong will you be on your worst day? The days when you feel invincible, when things are how they should be, when everything you touch turns to gold are easy to get through. However, in my experience the days that can leave lasting impressions are the ones where you find yourself walled in, unable to move or breathe; days where you can feel yourself slipping towards the gaping chasm of darkness; days where you desperately search for some sliver of happiness to hold on to.

All of us have had good and bad days. Usually, you get through the bad ones by focusing on the good ones. But what if you get a day where all hope is lost; a day where despite your best efforts there is nothing to hold on to. What will you become on that day? What will you do on that day?

The thought is scary. We all hope that we don’t encounter something beyond our endurance but that is just a hope. If that hope is futile and you find yourself at the precipice with nothing but darkness around you, will you survive?

The funny thing is that there is no way to prepare. You won’t know it until you are there and by then it might already be too late. It’s a simple question. How strong will you be on your worst day?