I have been busy and failed in my goal of posting daily, but perhaps that’s better, now I can focus on quality and not quantity.
As life passes events expire and I learn stuff. That’s just how it happens. Truthfully, a lot of the time I don’t even want to be learning, but life, like any good mother, makes sure I’m being fed. A combination of recent events brought on a feast of learning and now I am stuffed and lying in bed at one in the morning typing this post on my iPhone in a lazy attempt to regurgitate some of the knowledge.
While I can’t say all that I’d like to (mainly because my thumb is already getting tired), I would like to say this: life is what you make it. As Hamlet says, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” In this scene Hamlet is talking about how he feels like the city of Denmark is a prison to him, his friends disagree, and then he delivers that profound line above. Hamlet is aware that his unhappiness is a product of his mind–his thinking.
You would be surprised how little credence people actually give this idea. It’s not to say that there isn’t good or bad in the world, there is, but what Shakespeare is getting at is that the mind is both a prison and the key out. We shut ourselves up in our mind with our ideas about the world and how we think it is and should be. Once something comes along that challenges those beliefs we usually react in two ways: we either allow it to open our minds (acting as that metaphorical key) or we view it as a threat, something that is “bad,” and we immediately label it as such. In doing the latter we put ourselves in a (to complete the metaphor) prison of ignorance and unhappiness. Life is both the good and the bad, and there is learning to be had from both.
This doesn’t mean we go through life embracing the bad just as we do the good, but instead, we stop slapping our labels on everything. We slow down a moment and look at whatever it is we might initially see as “bad” straight in the eye and say, “wtf, I don’t understand you, but I’m going to try.” If we can resist our urge to instantly run off anything we deem “bad” with our judgmental shotgun of “good,” we might discover that things weren’t exactly as they had appeared to us originally. In labeling things we limit their meaning. If you think something is bad, then it will be bad.
Life is what we make it. People are what we make them. Our experience is neither good or bad, our thinking makes it so. The mind is a powerful tool for good, but far too often we allow it to trap us in the bad, and we lock ourselves up, like Hamlet, in our individual Denmarks.
Now my thumb really is sore; alas, I must stop. I will end with an excerpt from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson titled “Self-Reliance.” The entire essay is really long, and all of it is really incredible, but for the sake of space and your attention-span I have only included a few pertinent paragraphs. The point Emerson is making here is that far too often we limit ourselves because of how we see ourselves, because we care about how others see us, and because of our fear of breaking with conformity, or the popular or “normal” way to see something. Basically he is saying, to hell with your notions of what is socially acceptable or not, I don’t have to see it your way, I don’t have to adopt your notions of good or bad, I become great by using my mind to think and act for myself. If I want to change, then I will change, and I won’t let any notions of who I think “I am,” or who you think I am, stop me by limiting me and scaring me away from my personal evolution, my climb upward to a better, greater me. Enjoy!
“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. . .
“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
“But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
