Wednesday 30 May 2012

A Losing Battle

So apparently May 2012 is the month that I cave on many fronts, losing significant ground in my war against modernization. Not only did I get my very first cellphone (and a BlackBerry, to boot), but I'm even starting to blog. The world must truly be coming to an end; perhaps those Mayans were right... and by that, of course, I mean those fools with a penchant for misunderstanding Mayan culture. However, no matter: on to The Blog!

As with all of life's projects, it arrives in the middle. Not in the middle of itself, of course, but in the middle of everything else. Life is a cascade of projects in various states of completion and/or disarray: some are mid-stream, others are tailing off, and new ones come into the fold, taking the place of those that are coming to their end. However, there are times in life when that stream is interrupted by a given event, usually something quite major in the grand scheme of things. Here is a piece that I wrote about a year ago, back when my reserves of energy to fight modernism were young and fresh-faced and the suggestion to turn such pieces into blog posts were scoffed at, beaten to rubbish, and tossed aside as such. Anyway, enough griping. Here's that piece:

Putting Down the Roots, December 15, 2010

            So much of how we define ourselves is by what we do. “Who are you?” will often be answered with a statement like, “I’m a student,” or, “I’m a carpenter,” etc. None of these definitions are static, and by this I don’t mean that we are constantly changing professions or jumping careers, or anything of that sort. Rather, what I mean is that to be any of these things is to be constantly in a present defined by its past and its future. Take a carpenter, for example. A carpenter has always finished some projects, has always just finished some projects; there are always some projects on the go, and some projects to come. Even being a carpenter has a past, a present, and (importantly) a future built right into it. Defining ourselves just works that way: we are always looking ahead and behind in time, and see ourselves not only as who/where/when we are, but who/where/when we were, and who/where/when we will be.
            Last year, I was living in Montreal. I was finishing my final year of undergrad and new that I would be leaving the city for graduate school. Through the entire year, I felt very displaced, which was quite odd because I was still at home. In the present, I was still just the same as I ever had been (as much as one can be the same, anyway) but I always had an umheimliches sense of unease, as if I were not at home in my own skin.
            So much of how I had been before was defined by movement. I was in school, and part of a lot of projects, all of which were constantly moving forward. There was always something to get up to: putting together a conference, working on a research project, etc. Also, I was in a band in Montreal. Practices were always fun and laid back, but the impetus had always been to write a new song, or perfect a number for an upcoming performance or for another album. Without a future, that impetus died and rotted on the vine: there was no more drive behind practice, and while we still had plenty of fun just noodling, it totally lost its direction.
            All of these projects are defined by some timeframe that includes a completion in the future. Given my interests and my usual occupations, there was a surprisingly limited number of things I could get up to, and all because I knew I was leaving. Normally, I would have been thrilled to write more songs and work on them for hours and hours with the band, but knowing that I was leaving, knowing that we wouldn’t have enough time to put together another performance or recording, really took the wind out of our sails. Not that it wasn’t still fun, but that it wasn’t driven anymore.
            All this is not to say that all the fun is in completing a task; the fun of sports is not always in winning, for example. But I think there is a good argument to be made that the fun and the excitement are in the process of getting there, and knowing that one will not arrive can certainly take the interest out of the process.
            Going away to grad school, knowing that I would not be around long enough to see so many of these projects through to completion, took a lot of the drive out of me to get involved in the first place, or certainly that drive changed radically. A radical change in view for my future had a radical effect on my present, because we define ourselves by what we do, and what we do always has a future in view. The present is always a movement into the future, and who we will come to be has the power to change who we already are right now.