you got a notion you belong here, make it so

“No one has figured out how accidental is the marriage of blasphemy and fate.”

that’s a line from jim harrison’s “legends of the fall,” where the narrator calls into question if the protagonist’s damning of god decades before has led to the continued tragedies of his life. you can’t know. you’ll never know which forces have their hands on the levers. nor their intentions. sometimes you hear those forces and listen to them and are thankful. sometimes you damn them, because they got some shit to say that you were hoping to keep away from.

i think living a life that isn’t open to the voices of some kind of deep inner or grander calling is not one likely to be worth living. you’ve got to be humble enough to see that sometimes the forces know better. that you’ve got to keep your fucking eyes open to what they want to show you. ears too. that you can’t always rely on a pro/con list or a spreadsheet. some of the good answers don’t balance.

but i also know the danger available for believing too much in the fate thing. in the 2022 robert eggers film “the northman” the protagonist has a tragically fixed gaze on his sense of fate. he identifies with it. so addicted to chasing it that he doesn’t see all the components for a satisfied and meaningful life are already in front of him. or maybe he does see it. but seeing something, knowing it intellectually, is so much different than feeling it viscerally. and the heart is better at moving the feet.

“and it’s strange
all the things that i run from
are the things that
completeness could come from”
— gang of youths

—

any form of identifying gives a home base for the self. serves as a counterweight when the self reacts in ways that you’d rather not identify with, which happens. some asshole cuts you off and all the sudden the fact you listed one of your character strengths on that recent job application as “patience” doesn’t seem to matter.

but those selves you want to identify with have their pitfalls. thinking you owe too much to the voice inside can make you deaf to the voices outside. remember, your brain itself lives inside a dark, locked room. but you don’t. you live with the others. we are often told there’s a great value in being your “authentic, true self” and there’s an entire market of verification and self love and encouragement in that direction. but you could just as easily and “authentically” piss in someone’s cheerios if you felt the calling. and that wouldn’t exactly be right now would it.

when to listen and when to take the reins. there is not always a good way to know. and you’ve got your self to deal with. daniel kahneman spent more time thinking and writing about the human flaws in decision making than anyone and when asked in a 2019 interview at age 85 how that helped him make better decisions he said it doesn’t. think about that.

—

so you’ve got ideas about who you’re gonna be. promises to the self. can you keep them? what will you feel like if you don’t? if you’re not who you said you would be and then you’re lookin in the mirror and it’s you again. taking account. balancing the ledger. nobody to blame. it’s sunny and the sky is blue and at 11:27am you heard your voice for the first time because you been sittin inside feeling, well…

—

didion said “To do without self respect…is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening.” didion was right, and on days you can’t access IT you got a front row viewing of that movie. hell might be akin to being strapped to that chair. and the only way to avoid a living hell is to find, and keep, if only for stretches, IT. see those promises to the self.

the inkling that there are not just things you should do. right decisions. but there are also people you ought to try to be.

—

i myself have become enchanted as of late by something akin to fate. something like a weighty orientation, if nothing more. bordering on religious. i know not who placed it there or its purpose or its worth or whether it’s going to do me any goddamn good. this is all fleeting, lest i forget. we’re here on loan of sorts.

“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” — cormac

—

nothing has ever been as good as you wished it would be in your mind’s eye when you planned it and it makes it hard to plan more. nothing was ever as bad as you thought it might be either. you thought you’d fuckin die.

“The best things that happen I’d have never thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather. You do what you can.” — marilynne robinson

— -

and yet, minds like this over-intellectualize everything and the following is probably more true than any of the bull shit put forth above:

you will have many high minded ideas about how you’re gonna fix things, your life included, and even if your instincts are right for all of humanity the best thing you’ll likely ever do is look across a table and make one person feel like they matter. you ought to start living like that’s true.