The finer details of life. It's a cliched concept that has spurned a quasi-industry of self-help books, purported experts, and many a vacation for the sole purpose of losing oneself within oneself. It's a lofty goal to attain for anyone, though less so those in the higher strata of the socio-economic spectrum, and the idea is kind of ridiculous inherently because how can we begin to define what it is? What are they, where do we grasp them, where can they be bought, what does the box look like? This is, what I have begun to gather, a particularly American way of looking at the world, and yet I arrive at having to dismantle that particular cultural yoke in order to pursue them within myself.
My post-graduate space is, of course, marked by the time I am spending in Europe doing approximately nothing (and nothing can be a whole lot of things, let's not get so literal as I am wont to do), the relationship I have cultivated with a certain bodhisattva and how it is deconstructing, reconstructing, enriching, and detracting from all the rest, and how all of this is supposed to sum up to a platform from which I will leap into the next phase of adult life, be that a master's degree or the commencement of a professional career. Yet coming to Paris and having two weeks to occupy my own head space free of the banalities of life as I am accustomed to it and the obligations that come along with being at home in Lisbon or Denver, being received in an optimal fashion, and breathing somewhat more introspectively has given me a needed refresher on greater perspective and allowed me to stop viewing the loose ends around me as rope with which to form knots from which to hang myself, others, anything at all. Overwhelmingly, to the extent of requiring a change in linguistic environs, the message has been to stop thinking so much about the minutiae that perturb, period. Just stop. There is no elaboration.
So I have taken on, starting in Lisbon but continuing along much more in Paris, the idea of retreating inward and appreciating the more basic details of life—the sensual pleasure of the texture, smell, and taste of food, the full-body experience of the way the sound waves reverberate within oneself when listening to good music, the physical excitement from the intellectual challenge of discovery and growth. To think that a pursuit so simple has caused, in its own way, such a fair amount of grief and strife in my personal life is to oversimplify, yet it has. It's taken this long for me to fully grasp that this is all to say that part of self-actualization and part of being your own person sometimes means that you don't have to have complicated or finely elaborated explanations to things. Sometimes things are as simple as the brevity with which we describe them, and that should just be left at that. Sometimes the grand adventure is banal and mundane, and sometimes the satisfaction derived from that is acute. I could stand to learn from that in my own writing, don't you think? I, uptight by nature, reserved and literal, pragmatic and organized, rigid to a fault at times, obsessive always, am learning to chill out.
Alas.
My post-graduate space is, of course, marked by the time I am spending in Europe doing approximately nothing (and nothing can be a whole lot of things, let's not get so literal as I am wont to do), the relationship I have cultivated with a certain bodhisattva and how it is deconstructing, reconstructing, enriching, and detracting from all the rest, and how all of this is supposed to sum up to a platform from which I will leap into the next phase of adult life, be that a master's degree or the commencement of a professional career. Yet coming to Paris and having two weeks to occupy my own head space free of the banalities of life as I am accustomed to it and the obligations that come along with being at home in Lisbon or Denver, being received in an optimal fashion, and breathing somewhat more introspectively has given me a needed refresher on greater perspective and allowed me to stop viewing the loose ends around me as rope with which to form knots from which to hang myself, others, anything at all. Overwhelmingly, to the extent of requiring a change in linguistic environs, the message has been to stop thinking so much about the minutiae that perturb, period. Just stop. There is no elaboration.
So I have taken on, starting in Lisbon but continuing along much more in Paris, the idea of retreating inward and appreciating the more basic details of life—the sensual pleasure of the texture, smell, and taste of food, the full-body experience of the way the sound waves reverberate within oneself when listening to good music, the physical excitement from the intellectual challenge of discovery and growth. To think that a pursuit so simple has caused, in its own way, such a fair amount of grief and strife in my personal life is to oversimplify, yet it has. It's taken this long for me to fully grasp that this is all to say that part of self-actualization and part of being your own person sometimes means that you don't have to have complicated or finely elaborated explanations to things. Sometimes things are as simple as the brevity with which we describe them, and that should just be left at that. Sometimes the grand adventure is banal and mundane, and sometimes the satisfaction derived from that is acute. I could stand to learn from that in my own writing, don't you think? I, uptight by nature, reserved and literal, pragmatic and organized, rigid to a fault at times, obsessive always, am learning to chill out.
Alas.
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