November 9, 2012
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Reclaimer
Halo 4 just came out, but my XBox 360 is still in Montreal. Being in Sydney, that means that my XBox could not be geographically any further away.
Halo‘s always had a special place in my heart. Aside from Duke Nukem 3d, the original Halo was the one where I enjoyed the most competitive success. I played and beat Red Faction: Armageddon recently, which is a relatively new game. However, I find that at the end of the day, gameplay wise, it is just a much nicer looking version of the original Halo, with a few ideas stiched in from Gears of War 2.
I think that in life, once you’ve done a few really great or memorable things, these things become your benchmarks by which everything else is compared. Well, I guess it doesn’t need to be great or memorable– it just needs to be involving enough to really alter the mechanics of your thought process. It has to be something that you need to get your brain into.
Your past experiences become the vocabulary by which you describe the world. The more engaging a particular subset of experiences, the more likely it is that your method of communicating to others is going to make use of that vocabulary and those benchmarks.
That’s why, even when classmates and I from law school go out after exams and try to talk about anything except law, it’s naturally impossible to a certain degree– even if we try to avoid talking about classes, we inevitably refer to it in discussing the news, and we joke about it instinctively. [CM] has the same experience with med students.
It’s only natural I guess.
The thing is, I have a sneaky suspicion that human interaction and the quality of our relationships is based on the things we have in common. At the very least, if it’s not the things we have in common, it is the understanding of the attributes of experience that allow us to appreciate difference. For example: maybe one person is into break dancing, and another is into tap dancing. They’re very different uses of the human body, so these two people might not get along based on the connectivity of those two interests alone. However, if the two people are willing to trace back along the branches to the common human roots in body mechanics, training, rhythm, etc, then perhaps the fact that the end results are the same can still be drawn to a simlarity somewhere along the line?
I was talking to CM about this a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about the elections in US. We’re not American, but as Canadians, it was still a significant issue for us because so much of American culture inevitably dictates the direction of Canadian culture as well. Part of our discussion had to do with religion, and I was telling her how, despite my Catholic upbringing, if there was ever a religion I subscribed to, it’d probably be something more like some form of modified Taoism.
But really, what religion you have ultimately comes down to the basic principles that you believe are the best vocabulary for describing the world.
For me, the basic principles of Taoism are fluidity, and simply being. In case you didn’t know, the basic premise of a yin yang sign is like a Star Ware parable– there’s the Light Side of the Force, and the Dark Side of the Force. However, neither side exists without the other– there is a fluid transition between the white and the black, which is represented by the shape of the two elements “chasing” one another infinitely, kind of like an ourobouros. In that way, Star Wars represents the conflict of the Jedi and the Sith as really the problems with extremes– and the real stories are about the people struggling to find some sort of balance in their lives. The fact that you can never be pure in one way or the other is represented in the yinyang sign’s dot of the opposite colour within the main. It means that no matter how great a source of light or darkness, there are necessarily elements of the opopsite within you.
To me, the biggest principal of the Taoism that most people overlook is where on that symbol you fit. It’s not that you should be identifying with either the white piece or the black piece– in reality, you are the whole symbol. You’re both at once, in a swirling, constant flux. Separation and dissonance of your elements is what causes existential problems.
As a bit of a tangent, that belief is important in terms of maintaining a proper “work-life-balance.” I’ve been throwing that term around a lot lately because it’s one of those things that comes up in interviews a lot it seems, and I just two interviews in the last two weeks for law firms. One of them is for a German law firm, where I got the job as to be office bitch (“junior paralegal”), and the other one is for a mid tier commercial law firm clerkship (which is the important one, because this will lead to a graduate job) which I get the results for on monday or tuesday.
Anyway, as I was saying– it’s important because if you try and separate yourself from yourself for the wrong reasons, you’ll get all these bad feelings that will ultimately result in you not being able to get anywhere in life that will satisfy you. it’s hard to explain, but put it this way– certain feelings like guilt, worry, and low self esteem– these, from personal experience, are more than often due somewhere to a conflict in internal vocabulary. Somewhere along the line, you’ve experienced something that has profoundly affected the way that you frame the world– and it has been framed in a way which cannot be integrated with the world around you.
Traumatic experiences usually do that.
Until you can find a way to find some common ground between that you and the world around you, you’ll be like a broken yin-yang. The dissonance will never allow it to spin like a proper circle. And, looking at the pieces as separate parts, you’d be missing the whole point anyways– you’d be so concerned with the definition of this or that that you’d miss that you’re you’re an integral part of everything else, and everything else is a part of you– you’d miss the concept of connection that makes the human experience what it is.
So, as far as “fixing” broken people go, I’m not saying this to look down on anyone. I’ve been broken many times, and I’ve had to put the pieces back together. And everytime it happens it’s a pain in the ass– but it’s an important catharsis that we routinely have to go through so that there isn’t too much calcification of the mechanisms that power our experiences.
The fixing is really about reconnecting the isolated pieces.
There are a few ways of doing that, as I mentioned. You can find ways by which the vocabulary of that disconnected piece can connect to another person who has the same experience. Or you can find ways to connect it to another piece of yourself.
The intrinsic problem is that whether or not we want to admit it, some of these isolated pieces are our pride. I say pride because it’s shockingly misused here– pride could just be stubbornness, but it could also be something sacred. I did say that the experiences that define our perspective are the most engaging ones, right? That means that, for better or worse, the traumatic things that are the ‘problem pieces’ stay isolated and special because by design, we want to protect the core bits that define us, for fear of losing that which makes us unique.
But if we can only let that go, then we’ll connect with the whole world so much better.
Comments (1)
I just finished writing my long rant before I got to read yours. I was having a hard time writing, too because I cant really convey how I feel into words that’s why all my thoughts come out like brain vomit but you really nailed it. You said everything I was feeling but I couldn’t connect the dots. Thank you for connecting the dots. I would bow to you if I could.