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| FOOTLE BARON ON DIDGE |
In life
there is no end game except for death. Hmmm … I’ll rephrase: In life there is no end game except for life itself. (This smacks much better, yes? Allow me to
continue.)
Factoid: Death is imminent. Death is the ultimate negative
experience. Death is dreaded, and for
which prompts the living notion of existential angst and one of my favorite
phrases, Existential Dread.
To the
pseudo-stylistic writers and thinkers, life
is a journey. Hmmm … I hate this journey
metaphor which has become so cliché.
Rather than journey, I believe that life is a constant surprise party of
people coming out of closets, birthday cake and funeral candle celebrations, attachments
with silly strings and silly games, pop music, soda pop, and nacho chips. And to be the life of your very own surprise party, which
is always a chore when on public display, it would be so cool if you could
truly be yourself.
But what is your
true self, exactly? Is self, as
Aristotle claims, your core essence of a living being defined how you function
in the world. Or is self being the
Kapellmeister of your orchestral sub-personalities?
Whatever
self is, from time to time it does seem to get lost. Sometimes the self gets overtaken by other sub-personalities
that take on extreme roles. A few examples: sometimes I am a critic; sometimes I am an
athlete; sometimes I am a party animal (not really, but sometimes I would like
to be).
As a child (no
pun intended) I was always an artist, but only pencil portraiture. As an adult I am an educator and therapist, a
guitar and portrait busker. The songs
that I write and strum and sing on street corners, and the portraits that I
sketch for the passers-by, are really the mirrored reflections of my inner
world. These busking behaviors are the
person who I really always want to be, rather than how I technically behave at
prescribed times on certain days.
(To follow
my true self and hit the street as a full-time busker would take a ton of courage,
courage being the most important aspect of self.)
In a line ... It takes courage to be your true self.
Courage.
I used to think that courage meant something like going over Niagara
Falls in a wooden barrel. Such an action
took courage. My imagined connotation of
courage has somewhat thinned over the years.
For example, now it takes courage to come out of the closet. Now it takes courage to speak up at a staff
meeting. Now it takes courage to paint an apartment any color other than beige. You get the picture.
And so in
keeping in mind these pictures of courageous acts, I took my pencil and sketchbook
to the market on Saturday and drew some portraits. I have such courage!
Being
courageous is being curious. Curiosity
killed the cat. Killing your inner cat
will not kill you.
Rituals and
habits are safe but rather boring.
Killing your inner cat, being curious and courageous enough to allow
randomness in your life is an unlikely death sentence. I
walked down to the market, did some portrait busking, and survived to write
about it.
A courageous
sense of self prompts a strong sense of self-esteem and life satisfaction. A search for one’s self means exploring one’s
passions, and therefore finding one’s self means exercising one’s passions.
Where you are is where it’s at, and so to
become yourself, begin where you are.
Like I said … I walked down to the
market, did some portrait busking, and survived to write about it.
I’d like to
close with existential dread. Ah,
existential dread, of which we all suffer and yet, of which not all of us take
advantage. What finite time we do have
on this planet, we really ought to strive for quality.
Live (life) time should be quality
time because ...
dead time is just a breath away.
Those
marching in my CHAUCERIAN PARADE this week:
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| DIDGE AFICIONADO, KEN |
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| CORBYN AT THE MARKET |
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| FAHIM AT THE MARKET |
