November 14, 2012

• Mouthguard

  After the rejection from Piper Alderman, I’ve been making conscious efforts to work that dissapointment out of my head.  I’m not someone who meditates.  I know some people who do, such as [Paladin] most notably, but I think it’s just not for me.  In all fairness, I suppose I haven’t really tried all that hard at it more than a dozen times.  Maybe I should give it another go?

   

  I am not someone who deals well with emptiness– so if there is dissapointment in my life, somehow coming to terms with it or annuling the hurt it makes doesn’t necessarily make things better for me.  The thing is, such an event takes up space in my mind and spirit– and if I were to remove it or annul it, what would happen the moment that it was gone?  There’s emptiness.

   

  I suppose it’s not so much that I can’t get rid the symptoms of such an event.  It’s more that I don’t like the emptiness that follows after getting it over with.  The big question is “What’s next?”

   

  Looking at my own habits, I think what I do instead of annuling that event is to substitute it with something new.  I need to draw my attention on something else, and give myself purpose.

   

  I think that’s the worst thing about being dissapointed.  When you’re dissapointed, it’s a hard kick in the shin for your sense of purpose– you suddenly feel immobile and unable to go further.  There are two elements to dissapointment– there’s the psycho-spirituatl element of it, and then there’s the factual “reality” element of it.

   

  The reality of most situations of dissaopintment is that we’re never as old as we think, and it’s never too late, and we always have more chances.  Basically: you can try again.

   

  However, the psycho-spiritual element of it is a bit tougher to tweak, because of our pride.  We like to think that we get what we deserve, and, more importantly, we like to think that we deserve something just because we want it badly enough.  Truth is, good things and bad things happen to people all the time for dumb luck reasons, and that messes with our sense of entitlement.  If we can’t trust our sense of deservingness, and if we can’t trust the external world to reward our genuine efforts when we deserve something, we start to doubt the mechanics of the game and wonder if we can ever get anywhere.

   

  Following dissapointment, that’s exactly what happens: the reality of a situation probably hasn’t changed, but our expectations on the psycho-spiritual level have taken a bad hit.

  Whiel it is true that if we hadn’t put so much expectation on something, we might not be dissapointed, what fun would a world be without a sense of real accomplishment, a real sense of satisfaction when we do get what we want?  It’s a double edged sword– it’s the reason why we take so many things for granted.  The things we take for granted are the elements of life where they are simply a reality– msot of us  have no sense of “deserving” a bed to sleep in, running water, or food on the table, because these are things that we don’t need make any  psycho-spiritual investments in.  As such, we don’t really care: that stuff just is.

   

  So it seems rather inevitable that when we want things, and we’re dissapointed, we might feel that we wish we didn’t want it, because it would hurt less.    Is that what we’re supposed to do though?

   

  I wonder if that’s exactly what leads to a dulling of the spirit that results in people realising, one day, that life is boring.

   

  I always tell people that my way of dealing with any sort of negative emotions is to channel it into anger.  If you can get angry, you can move on to plotting new ways of doing things.  You can move on to getting even. Not necessarily with that particular stymied goal– it could be something larger.  You can take it out on life and win something else just to spite it for ever daring to oppose you that other time.
  

   

  Moments of dissapointment are good refresher courses for me.  Yes, it’d be great if I could just have “won” in the first place.  Havnig “lost,” the best thing to do is to salvage as much from the situation as possible and learn from it; apply all that in the next fight.

   

  I’m reminded of a scene from the old Mel Gibson movie, Payback.  At some point, he gets into a car, tells his passenger to buckle up– and then puts in a mouthguard.  Then drives at full speed, and has a head on collision with another car on purpose.  Because that’s what he needed to do.

   

  Gibson criticisms aside, there’s a parable in there somewhere.  I own like 3-4 mouthguards actually, and whenever I’m doing contact activities, I wear it.  A mouthguard prevents your upper and lower teeth from chipping eachother when you take a shot in the face, or when you grit too hard.  When you take an upwards blow in the chin, the mouthguard acts as a shock absorber, buffering some of the damage from slamming your brain against the inside walls of your skull. 

   

  A lot of conviction in life can be analogised to putting on a mouth guard.  It means, simply, recognising that shit can go down.  You can play all your cards right but it might still not be enough.  In that case, you just need to do everything you can to prevent it from getting to your head.  You need to bite down, grit your teeth, and be ready to take a few to deal a few.

   

  Putting a mouthguard in isn’t just addressing the harshess of reality– it also means that you’ve made a psycho-spiritual decision to accept that thigns are likely to deviate from plans.

  • 7:55 pm
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