“Nobody gets what they want without giving up something they love.”
– Gossip Girl narrator.
In the above photo, Little J with her trademark visage – always glancing around the invisible corner of her own self, half-askance, half-hopeful, and wholly living from her lower lip and her dream.
Every person’s life is animated by one of two desires. We either live to avoid discomfort, or we live to have as much intercourse with the world as possible.
By intercourse, I don’t mean merely sexual intercourse. I mean a “give and take” with life: taking in all the myriad things the world offers, and as a result having something meaningful and unique to give back with confidence. This kind of intercourse almost always involves stepping out of your hiding places. It’s often emotionally raw and you feel awkward doing it at first. The reward for doing this, though, is that you feel new pleasures and understandings inthings that you didn’t even know you lacked before. These pleasures and understandings are impossible without walking through that discomfort.
I suspect that everybody’s life, at times, traffics in both realms: avoiding discomfort and having as much intercourse as possible. Clearly, everyone is capable of both. But make no mistake: when you look at the lives of others, and when you look at the results of your own life, it’s not difficult to tell which of these desires animates your daily existence.
It’s really that simple. The two are, over any length of time, absolutely, unconditionally, mutually exclusive.
Which desire animates you? Which one, when you look back at your life so far, has produced your favorite moments — the give & take or the drive to remain comfortable? Which, ultimately, has produced deeper comfort in your life?
When your sleepy eyes open tomorrow morning and no one else can hear, ask yourself how you really feel.
The concept of this song by Owen is simple enough: a guy and a girl, strangers, sharing a hospital room for broken bones, start to fall in love. What the song means, though, and how it’s really helped me to understand my relationships, is after the “keep reading” link below.
Enjoy the song first — it’s short, and light, beautiful, and acoustic. The lyrics are right below the video.
We bonded over broken bones.
Who’s broke skin, who’s fractured in two places, and whose hurt the most.We bonded over broken bones.
How many Vicodin we took before bed, how many we sold
to the band sleeping on our floor;
Week one of a two week tour.
God knows, they’ll need it more than us.You and me; an x-ray machine.
I swear that day you saw straight through me.We’re two bags of bones, broken and talking
of people we both know in common.
Amongst other things that I shouldn’t mention.You and me: a hospital love scene.
If only these broken bodies were ours forever.
For the relationship of this song to, well, my relationships, click the “keep reading”.
So the following from Alice Miller is what started the ground-shaking revolution a few weeks ago:
Quite often I have been faced with people who were praised and admired for their talents and their achievements. They do well in everything they undertake; they are admired and envied; they are successful whenever they care to be — but behind all this lurks depression, and a sense that their life has no meaning. These dark feelings will come to the fore as soon as the drug of grandiosity fails, as soon as they are not on top, not definitely the superstar, or whenever they suddenly get the feeling they have failed to live up to some standard. What are the reasons for these disturbances in these competent, accomplished people? Typically, this child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond unconsciously to this need of his parents to take on the role that had been unconsciously assigned to him by them.
This accomodation to parental needs often leads to the “as-if” personality. The person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self.
As an adult, this “grandiose” person is admired everywhere and needs this admiration; indeed, he cannot live without it. He must excel brilliantly in everything he undertakes, which he is surely capable of doing (otherwise he just does not attempt it). He, too, admires himself, for his qualities and success and achievements. Beware if one of these fails him, for then the catastrophe of a severe depression is imminent.
Click on the “Keep Reading” link, and after the jump she further dresses me down and talks about my choice of marriage partner, my contempt for others, my struggle for authenticity, and how all this craziness gets resolved.
As usual, this was quite a year.
365 days ago, I was living with spartan furniture in a different city, deeply in love and joined in a life with a woman I no longer even speak to. It was before Bon Iver, before The American Dollar, before my last birthday night, before the old apartment got new furniture, before Terry Richardson, before The Wire, before Facebook, before David Foster Wallace, before Gossip Girl, before AG, before the real estate project, before the apothecary, before Taleb, before creating the Legacy Strategy movement, before starting to make it work, before EB White, before the trips to Jersey City, before de Botton, before the summer, before love walked away with little explanation, before the aftermath, before the healing, before the new spots, before the new people, before the midnight swims and the new apartment, before Bammers and a whole new generation of change, before the new clothes, before the new deals, before the marriage proposal videos, before feeling the whole world rush through me again, before the new friends, and — most of all — before being completely changed by Alice Miller’s work on the origins of grandiosity & depression in the lives of adults.
The great lesson is that I have no idea — none whatsoever — what life will look like in a year.
And there’s something beautiful about that.
We. Shall. See.
Finally, I have found the proposal video that will take your breath away. With this, I end this little journey.
What I have learned is the following:
1. These videos, at their best, are records of a moment where everything else falls away, where your entire consciousness is in your throat, where the only thing on earth that matters is right now, right here. This is the moment, as David Blaine says of his endurance work, that “takes away the ego” and “puts you in a position so intense that the ordinary ‘I’ doesn’t exist anymore”, where you are called to “live truthfully in a given moment…and feel completely alive and awake at one specific moment.” In my first post on this blog, I quoted Jeff Buckley: “There’s only ‘present’ and ‘absent’. That’s it. It’s the balls, just the utter deathlessness, fearlessness.” For all of us, this is the moment we cannot fake, cannot possibly be false for. All of one’s life before should lead up to this moment, and all of one’s life after should be an effort to become worthy of the person you implicitly promised to be in that moment. Remember Godard: I said I love. That is the promise. Now, I have to sacrifice myself so that, through me, the word ‘love’ means something. As a reward, at the end of of this long undertaking, I will end up being he who loves.
2. The proposals that are most moving are not the most clever or the most populated with family or the most Graustarkian. What is most moving is watching a person — even if only for a solitary, fleeting moment — become something bigger than they are: they become love itself. These proposals are not great because they are sweet, but because they remind us all of who and what we really are.
3. In the truly great videos, the woman’s response is visceral — you can see that it completely takes over her body, where she instantaneously abandons grocery lists and errands and industry conferences, abandons even the ability to control her hands or, most powerfully in the following video, her ability to speak. The man is steady, fully present, vulnerable, and strong.
4. What makes the following video the most moving is the gravitas. While in a past blog post I’ve sung the praises of the utterly adorable ice skating girl for her total commitment to the moment, what I also realize is that her love is thorough, but thin. Even from where she kneels in total abandon, she is only capable of giving a certain amount; she hasn’t yet been hollowed out, hasn’t yet been left out to rot with the sky and the rain, hasn’t yet been called upon to be something larger than she is, to lead others, hasn’t yet failed at something that meant everything to her, hasn’t yet been successful at something she never thought she could, hasn’t yet reached into the lives of others to fundamentally alter them because of who she, uniquely, is.
Now, at the end of 2008, I can say I have been hollowed out. After this year, I have been left out to rot with the sky and the rain. I have been called upon to be something larger than I was at the time, to lead others, to create things where before there was nothing. I have failed at things that meant everything to me, and I have been successful at things I never thought it remotely possible that I could. I have reached into the lives of others, and, to quote Lauren quoting Koo, have left fingerprints on their appliances.
My final thoughts and the video are after the jump.
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