An Essay A Day For A Year
By Roe
Day 62, March 2, 2012
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If you want to grow something, you either have to use very fertile ground, or you have to use fertilizer. If you want to grow yourself, you also have to be on fertile ground, and you also have to use fertilizer. Eventually fertile ground becomes depleted, and you must either change to more fertile ground, or you must ad fertilizer. For me, fertile ground for growing myself is as simple as different ground than the one I was on yesterday. Today I’m going to do x + y = wow. Tomorrow I will try x – y = euw. Yesterday I tried busying myself all day so that I didn’t even have time to think, and today I am going to do absolutely nothing so that I can’t stop thinking. This week I have been a good boy, and next week I’ll put on my bad boy hat and stir up some shit. It turns out for me that the different aspects of shit are in fact my own growth fertilizer. When I feel like shit I am fertile for growth, when I stir up shit, I stir up room for my own growth. When times are shit, then times are ripe for growing and changing.
The first question I suppose is, “do I want to change and grow?” It’s good to feel good and like to be good, and have all good people and good times be always good. That is a good thing. But good for good’s sake, at all good times and places, for all the good reasons, is actually not very good for growth and change. We are all of the instant gratification types, and it is good to want what we want, when and where and how we want it. It is also normal and natural to not want the bad things ever, and we all want to feel good and not feel bad. But living in search of good gratification, and fleeing from and resenting unhappy ground and painful fertilizer, causes us to be frozen in our maintenance of a stagnated self. If we are decided to be at the spot we are at, just like we are at it, then we do not want to change and grow. If that is true, then we must keep chasing sunlight, and never turn and face the shadows. The problem is of course that it is impossible, and sooner or later we end up in the shit, and feeling like shit, during shit times.
I know that the hardest and most difficult times of my life were the times when I grew and changed the most, and yet they are the times that I hope I never return to. Now I’m beginning to feel weird. I really do want to change and grow, that is the point of my whole life. The times when I change and grow the most are the very fertile, turbulent and dissatisfying at the moment times of my life, which once I’ve grown and changed I am afraid to repeat. How in the world am I going to change and grow when I resist and fear the process that is most provocative at helping me to change and grow? It seems like I must learn to actually provoke and expect and welcome and appreciate and harness feeling like shit? Ouch. That doesn’t sound like a happy life.
What is a happy life anyway? Today I win the lottery and end up on Oprah, and on the show I meet my soul mate super model who is perfect and we have an ideal life in every way, and each and every day. Then I subtract my loss of privacy, and the drug and alcohol addiction of me and my wife’s, minus a miscarriage and having to be bailed out of jail by my homosexual son for beating up a paparazzi who squished my blooming orchids, who was in fact trying to climb through my daughters window to sleep with her. X + “oh yeah” minus Y, over “holy shit” divided by laughs, X lots of ouch = Life. Isn’t a happy life gooder average of good times and bad? Doesn’t bad fertilizer, shit times, help us to grow and change and create and appreciate the good times?
Some may call me a masochist, and OK, sometimes that suits me. Other times I loathe stepping out the door and into pain and challenges even more than the guy next door. Maybe I’m more of an extremist than anything else, extreme this, and extreme that. I would extremely like to take you up into a very small airplane, and over the jungles of who-knows-where, we will both jump out with tiny parachutes, and go thud into the very fertile fear of all the new ground. In six months how will we be doing? Lets’ find out! I just can’t wait to suffer and then find out what happens next. But maybe I’m doing that because I’m afraid to grow and change, and I am in fact just masochistically imagining selfhood evolution through trials and tribulations. Ok, let’s you and I get two hotel rooms and we’ll lock ourselves inside separately and alone for a whole month, with nothing to do but have nervous break downs. Now I’m making myself nervous.
Let’s slow it down to manageable Life. Let’s provoke ourselves to do and experience new things with the idea of growing and changing. Let’s expect and deeply appreciate the difficulty that our shifting is going to cause, and let us enjoy, in a very personal and selfish way, our suffering. Our suffering does not mean that all is peachy fine with us, or that only the world or times are shitty. If we were just perfect, with no issues and traumas and unfulfilled needs, we would not be suffering. So our suffering means that we are suffering, and the shitty world and times has just triggered or uncovered our problems. During this time it is critical to our selves to appreciate wallowing in our fertilizer, and let it all come to a very shitty head where we can gain something. Suffering times are times for crying and grieving, the only time we actually heal, and they are times for life changing introspection.
So when we parachuted into the jungles of deep Borneo with only the clothes on our backs, your adventure outfitter was waiting for you with a soft pad to land on and an air conditioned Land Rover, and you were back at your hotel for tea with the lovely wife. Life is good. I got stuck in a tree, bitten by horrendous red ants, rescued by a head hunter that never retired, and taken back to his village to be eaten. I sobbed all the way. Luckily I had swelled up so bad from the bites that all his gorgeous young, virgin daughters nursed me back to health, and we all fell in love. We now all have 8 children with bones in their noses. I haven’t had a hamburger in a decade, and I am so, so miserable a lot of the time. Life has its ups and downs.
I’m not sure what kind of life is better than any other, but I do know that fertilizer is coming your and my way. Let’s put it to good use.
www.yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com
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