2 posts tagged “introspection”
Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits-and then
Re-mold it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Every now and again I believe solitude is necessary for us to better understand the way we think and feel. I think the term loner is misunderstood like the word love. It's a filler term where we group many different types of people together and just assume the label means something useful. I use the term to describe someone who is comfortable being alone and can enjoy their own company. The usual connotation of the term is negative describing people such as the unabomber or that creepy person who leers at young children divorced from the real world. I detest the fact that the term has been co-opted to describe something that shouldn't be negative. Many of the greatest innovations of humanity are from people who have been who have been comfortable in their crowd of one.
I spent a great deal of time as a child alone. I could imagine new worlds , learn by myself, explore and create. The greatest feeling of liberation I got when I was around 7 and my father brought home a computer. I was in love with the machine the first time I sat down to play with it. I spent all my time free time with it. My parents got concerned many times and I thought I should spend more time outside and being around kids. The machine had all my focus I wanted to learn how to master it and do things other people couldn't do. It was pure fun to me and the hours would melt away. I still have that feeling being around computers. When I was in high school I was letting my grades slip because I was spending so much time working on code (writing software). I felt it was more important to figure out how render polygons quickly than learn about covalent bonds. At one point my parents out of concern talked to most of my teachers. One teacher sat me down and told me to stop spending so much time behind the computer it wasn't good. I thought he was a fool. He didn't understand it was the computer that would save me not his dry advanced level math class. I wasn't stupid I just had a different focus from all my peers and if people didn't get it was their problem. This attitude of mine probably kept my parents up at night and has caused all kinds of heartache. I'm just incredibly lucky to have the parents I have. I don't think I could have survived in a more traditional home where parents were to always be obeyed.
By now you probably have the impression that I can't function with regular people. I actually do enjoy being around and meeting new people. I just don't like spending excessive amounts of time with them. I like to listen to what people have to say from cab drivers, to kids to the people sitting next to me at a coffee shop. Like anything it can be a mixed bag of curiously penetrating insight to utter drivel. I do have a general mistrust of regular people. Their thought patterns are curiously monotonous and are heavily peer influenced. I guess it's natural to want to be one of the crowd but it seems ridiculous the lengths to which people will go to fit in. I guess this is why religion thrives because it's another way to be accepted just suspend rational thought and you're part of the group. There is no point in thinking because the group knows better. The crowd is not always so wise despite what pop-science authors will have you believe.
I'm not as socially flexible as most people are when it comes to friends. With acquaintances it's easy because there is minimal interaction and I'm quite happy to put up as many masks as they wish to see. With friends it's a different story and I try to be careful but often make horrible mistakes. I'm ultimately a very sensitive person. I feel way too much so I naturally keep most people at an arms length. My most intimate thoughts are shared with a tiny fraction of people I consider friends. It's not a lack of trust but it takes a certain kind of person to understand me. I prefer clean cuts and if a friendship has run its course I prefer to let it die quickly instead of slow lingering death of awkward conversations and ever increasing silence. I think many people fail to see this because they are under the misguided impression that it's some how noble to stick to someone even though you don't gain anything positive from being around them. It's funny the number of times I've sat down with people where they have actively talked about a mutual friend and understood their flaws and know that on the aggregate the person isn't that stellar but are willing to suspend reality just to have someone to hang out with. What a tangled web we weave.
More food for thought:
Night (O you whose countenance)
Night. O you whose countenance, dissolved
in deepness, hovers above my face.
You who are the heaviest counterweight
to my astounding contemplation.
Night, that trembles as reflected in my eyes,
but in itself strong;
inexhaustible creation, dominant,
enduring beyond the earth's endurance;
Night, full of newly created stars that leave
trails of fire streaming from their seams
as they soar in inaudible adventure
through interstellar space:
how, overshadowed by your all-embracing vastness,
I appear minute!---
Yet, being one with the ever more darkening earth,
I dare to be in you.
-rilke
Being the outlier that I am I often find things fascinating that other people find boring. One example is my interest in history and geopolitics. I've noticed that in general when I bring it up during conversations with people I know or new people it's very short lived. The curious thing is that the most interesting geopolitical conversations I've had recently are with cab drivers. I was going into work yesterday and I started talking to the cab driver about the weather which turned into the orange crop that got wiped out and then to the price of orange juice. From the crop that failed I talked about a similar incident in Australia last year where the banana crop got wiped out and the prices sky rocketed. The cabbie mentioned it would be strange to think in America about the price of bananas going up because of how it imports bananas. I told him about the US vs EU banana dispute which happened in the 90s where the WTO had to arbitrate. This leaped into how countries deal with each other which meant we got to the middle east. We talked about what can be done about Iraq at this point and this lead to talking about Iran/Israel and the eventual conflict that will happen over nuclear armament. Unfortunately we arrived at my destination and our conversation had to end. All this from a simple statement about the strange weather in SF.
I like to push buttons and perhaps that's a faux pas but there's a part of my brain that lacks the kill switch to stop (perhaps I have aspegers?). A favorite question of mine right now is if there should be a tactical strike against Iran as it tries to build nuclear weapons. I'll post my views on it at some point (It will be a long post). I ask the question to figure out how people think and how much they know about the world. I've had silence, yes/no answers and long conversations about it. I think people who know me are sick of how many times I ask the question to people I've just met. Silence generally means you don't know or care enough to give an answer (the vast majority of people). The long conversations are fun because it shows you know something about the world. I'm not so much interested in the position you take just that you can articulate your position. The worst answer is a yes/no without any supporting evidence. It would seem better to just say "I don't know anything about it and stop talking to me".
I had some time before meeting a friend for dinner and drinks last night so I picked up the The Journal of International Security Affairs. Before you start whispering "right wing nut" I read lots of different things. I read stuff from all over the political spectrum. I was interested in this issue because it was about US allies in the 21st century and adversaries. I wanted to see what the current hawkish perspective is. It was also an interesting prop during drinks because I know what people thought when they picked it up and said "is this yours?". The look on their face said it all and in particular in SF people will automagically label you as some kind of conservative. I find it funny because my politics are nothing like that. Needless to say my conversations with them were rather short. It may have also been because I was uninteresting and asking inappropriate questions.
It got me thinking about it when I got home. When did I become contrarian? It turns out pretty young. When I was in 1st or 2nd grade we had an international day coming up and we were told to write a speech about the country we were born in. I was born in Sri Lanka so I thought I'd write about my views about it. Every other kid wrote the same general stuff about the country they were born in and why it was so great. My speech started like this "My name is Prasanna and I was born in Sri Lanka and I hate the country I was born in". I then explained while a country rich in resources and unmatched natural beauty it was falling apart with civil war. I have to give credit to my teacher she had read what I had written and picked me as one of the people to give the speech in front of all the parents, students and teachers. I remember the reaction of the crowd when I started my speech and people kept telling me what a brave little boy I was for speaking my mind. To me it's far better to let people know where you stand instead of being silent.
