Pensées

Sometimes lots of good ideas just hit you at once.  Indeed, it happens to me quite often that I'm overwhelmed with all the good things I want to do, the things I want to plan, the books I want to read, and the things I want to write.  The main problem is they can't all possibly be done at once, so it just leaves me in a frantic rush to do as much as I possibly can and then fizzles out by the time my alarm goes off the next morning and I don't feel like getting out of bed.  My goal here, writing today, is simply to write a few scatter thoughts that have been on my mind, each worthy of a blog post in their own right.  A big problem for me is that I am too meticulous in my writing.  I try almost too hard to express precisely what I want, when in fact no words will be perfect in describing what it is I'm talking about.  I spend too much time trying to find the perfect phrase, etc.  So I am trying to do the exact opposite right here and now.  I'm just simply going to write.  I hope my scattered thoughts you might find interesting, but in someways I just want to get them down on (virtual) paper.  It's quite possible that this way of writing might just be the perfect way to make ideas stick.  Peter Kreeft, philosopher at Boston College, thinks that Blaise Pascal's Pensées is one of the best books ever written precisely because it is unfinished and scattered.  If it had been completed and followed a perfectly logical progression, it would have been ruined.  So God in his mercy killed Pascal before his book was finished.  I don't know whether I agree with Kreeft, but Pensées is pretty good and if I volunteer to write down unfinished thoughts, maybe God will spare my life.

One things that's been on my mind is the idea of self forgetfulness.  There is another answer to the riddle which I proposed in my last post.  The Self.  The only way to find one's self is to completely forget one's self.  Get so caught up in what you are doing, that you become completely unselfconscious.  Self-consciousness is generally a bad sign.  If you are self conscious, you can never truly be yourself in social situations.  If you are self conscious about the kind of job you are doing, you are probably doing a bad job.  To paraphrase Kreeft, no one ever made a good impression by trying to make one.  Just think about the absentminded genius.  They are so lost in their work, that they forget to take care of themselves or they even forget where they are.  Learning to become disinterested to even one's own desires and happiness is moving swiftly down the road to joy.
I love the change of the seasons.  Much to my joy, I've discovered that the smell and feeling of Fall is the same in London, England as it is in Southeast Michigan, or South Bend, Indiana.  The first days of any change in season are always so wonderful.  The smell brings back memories of the same time in years past, as does the feel of the wind or the weather.  Running around the nearby park has brought back memories of playing high school soccer on windy days in October.  It reminds me of my backyard during fall, both in Michigan and even dimly in Indiana, though I was seven or younger at that time.  I think of playing kickball in the backyard with friends.  I think of the leaves falling around the lakes at Notre Dame, and driving up Notre Dame avenue just after Fall break, the golden dome in view.  I am reminded of beautiful faces.  Fall makes me feel lovesick and homesick at the same time.

Friends.  It's struck me that those friendships which I most especially value are those which make me feel completely humbled.  I've been blessed through my life to meet many wonderful people.  Sometimes I just wonder to myself in sort of awe, "How is it that I am so lucky?"  There isn't anything that I could possibly have done to make myself worthy of this friendship.  And so I experience their friendship as pure gift.  Friendship is a gift you give, but more importantly is a gift that you receive.  When I go wrong is when I think "shouldn't these people want to be my friend.  Yeah, I've got lots of great personal qualities."  The reality is that I do not deserve to have friends and that I can't make anyone be my friend.  It is pure gift.  It's about standing in receptivity to the gift of another person.  For a Christian, I think friendships are particularly important because they teach us how to be a receiver, the relationship we always stand in towards God.

I think this bit about friendship ties in nicely with the theme of self-forgetfulness.  In a true friendship, the self-consciousness of meeting someone has fallen away.  You no longer think about thinks like "What sort of questions should I ask this person?  What should I say?  What do they think of me?"  Ironically, it is losing this self-consciousness in relationship that allows one to be oneself and to actually share more of oneself.  Deep friendships have reached the point where sharing deep truths about one's self is easy and natural.  It's as though the barrier of the self has broken down.

What about love?  (Upon reflection, that questions terribly deals with the ambiguity of our language.  Let me rephrase: "What about Eros?")  I have found it difficult to think about marriage in terms of this ethic of self-forgetfulness.  In my present thinking, I haven't been able to see the married state as something which does enough to "draw one out of The Self."  I'm not saying the problem is with marriage, but rather the problem is with my own inadequacy.  When I look a marriage, I see a good thing, a beautiful thing.  There are many things I find attractive about that state of life.  But were I drop everything and get married today, I would be pursuing it as something that I want, something that I think would make me happy.  I want this woman to love me and I want to love her and spend time with her because that gives me joy.  Thought of like this, that is hardly a drawing out of the self.  But like I said the problem is with me.  I've never reached the state (or if I have, I don't remember it particularly well), where I've been so transported by the joys of Erotic love that my own desires have melted away and my self so forgotten so that the 'I' becomes 'we.'  I've not reached that place where lifelong love and commitment becomes not something that I want as I, but as some completely natural and seemingly inevitable next-step to join together a selfless 'we.'  Perhaps I'm romanticising love too much.  However, it does make perfect sense to me when older, happily married couples say that "We've more in love now that when we were first married."  It's because they lived through so much together, and have been required to make so many sacrifices, that they most certainly had to forget themselves and their own wants.  I mean they have made sacrifices not in a petty, "We'll do what you want because it makes me feel good to give you what want," sort of way, but in a way which requires real pain.
(Edit: I don't mean to introduce a discontinuity between friendship and Eros.  Indeed, I think a true romance will inspire a feeling of humility just as a true friendship does, and that romantic love will be experienced as a gift, just as friendship is.  I also think they pose a similar challege, in that both are often initially sought in response to a personal desire, but in both that desire can be transcended.  What I wrote about Eros could easily have been written by someone else about friendship.  Perhaps, I should just retract the whole paragraph.  Nevertheless, I think it is true to say that perhaps because there is greater attraction to Eros and the possibility for self-transcendence is even higher, it is more difficult to initially escape the self-seeking element.  The reflection above betrays the subjective state of the author and should be understood accordingly.)

The last paragraph took me an outrageous amount of time to write compared with the rest of the post.  If it's the worst paragraph, it certainly proves Kreeft's theory.  In anycase, I hope I can return to a more free-flowing style for the last few thoughts here.  The first is, when thinking about self-forgetfulness and such over the past few days, its occured to me that perhaps I should blog less.  While blogging might initially seem more other-directed than simply journaling, for me this is entirely not true.  Way too often I am motivated to blog in part by a vain desire to have others admire what I've writen, combined with a need to share what I am thinking.  But perhaps what is even more annoying, is that when I have an awesome thought, I can automatically think to myself "Boy, that would make a great blog post.  Won't people think I'm awesome for having such a great thought."  That spoils the thought as a thought in its own right, and is pretty vain to boot.  Although, if I decided just to journal about these thoughts, I'll probably still have an intrusive complusion to journal.  Perhaps the easiest solution to allay some of these qualms is to just check my Blogger stats much less often.

Finally, related to the blogging/thought hoarding problem, I've often gotten frustrated in my past trying to obsessively seize with my mind beauty things or cool experiences.  The worst is when I have a camera, which becomes an extension of my mind, and I begin to take pictures complusively, trying to save the memory of what is there.  Not that I discourage picture-taking, but I've found the enjoyment of a thing is often spoiled by trying to enjoy it.  Better just to be receptive and to let things come as they are.  Then you'll be surprised what you can enjoy if you are not trying.

Later Dudes (and Dudettes for those feminists who claim that the word 'dude' excludes 'dudettes.'  Actually, why do some feminists insist that terms like 'waiter' works now for both 'waiter' and 'waitress,' but get really mad if I don't specify 'woman' in addition to the term 'man?'  Perhaps they would get offened that I specified 'dudettes.'  I'm so confused.  And I wish everybody would stop making generalizations.)!