30 part 2

I believe I am now officially the guy who refuses to leave the stage. The boxer who thinks he can take one more punch before retirement. It's time Evander. But I feel the need to make sense of the past thirty days (technically thirty-one, as I accidentally miscounted, damn math) and bring some sort of cohesion to this little project of megalomania.

However, I think the chief thing that I learned while blogging about my life is that it's nearly impossible to come up with a coherent narrative that exemplifies my life. Rather, any sort of linear structure that I give to my life is really being imposed rather than arising organically. What I'm saying is that coherence doesn't exactly jive with growing up. You change, sometimes rapidly, seemingly from one person to another. This begins of course when you look at a picture of yourself as a child, and though you no that it's you, a great deal of cognitive dissonance arises because it appears to be you in name only. I don't bear any relation to the little baby on my parent's bed in that first picture.

But then, strangely, as you get older you begin to recognize yourself in pictures but not in actions. I realize (and this may be more of a personal failing rather than an overarching sort of point. Thus, the switch back from you to I) that I don't bear any great relation to myself at twenty-one either. Or Twenty-six. I can see now that my only constant state is flux. Though I've developed into the person I am through all of these years and experiences, I am still constantly changing. (I look forward to being sixty-five and not being interested in changing at all. Caveat, as I near thirty some of the most important people in my life are nearing sixty-five, and so I'll probably have to up this platonic old age thing to eighty or so).

"The time to make up your mind about people is never!"

Thus, I may have known you when you were three, or seven, or twenty, or ninety. And I'm certain that I created an idea of who you were, and who you probably are now. And the reality is that that picture is probably inaccurate. We are infinitely more complex and nuanced than the small snippets of self that we reveal to people. I remember in college getting to know a lot of people really well and being surprised at how many of them were deep, complex and interesting people. The moralizing will end soon. The moral being, as if it hasn't been clear already, that this blog, which has presumably been about getting to know myself again, has only made it clear what a mystery I, (and here I think it's safe to say we) are.

So I find myself having to resist the impulse to pin people down during the course of writing this blog, resist turning them into two-dimensional characters that played a bit part in the starring role of my life. Forgive me, I know so little about everything. And now, I demure to texts greater than mine. The first from Virginia Woolf:

"Like a work of art," she repeated, looking from her canvas to the drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which transversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

And of course, if I'm going to take my own advice and go on trying to never make up my mind about people (obviously meant to be interpreted as a positive mental state, not as an inability to form any sort of opinion at all about one's acquaintances/friends)

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”