Rutting

[jazzfish]

A single line in a comment to someone else's post spawned some rather rambling thoughts, and at some point I realised that they belonged in their own entry since they'd wandered rather far from the original topic.

narquelion: As long as I'm still aware and appreciative of the familiar, rather than taking it for granted always

That's key. One of the underlying issues I'm currently struggling with is my tendency to take things for granted. It's there now, it's always been there, it'll always be there, why bother paying attention to it? But when you do that you fail to notice the little changes (everything changes, it's part of being alive) and you suddenly turn around one day and it's something different, and not at all what you thought it was.

---

I seek stability. I gravitate towards routine, towards being able to do things in what I've determined is the 'best possible' way. But at the same time that bores me, often without my even realising it. Stupid example: my first couple years in an apartment I discovered Wal-Mart pot pies. They're pretty good, and at forty cents apiece they're great for a college student. So I ate a lot of them. Until one day I took a bite and realised "I hate these." I'd gotten so used to eating the things that I hadn't realised I was getting sick of them. They did made it so I didn't have to worry about food, which has always been low on my priority list anyway. It was just rather shocking to discover that my food tastes weren't completely static, and that my food preferences weren't nonexistent.

Variety is the spice of life, but I can't live on spices. (Insert bad joke about Dune here.) I need change, but more I need to watch myself more closely so that I can know when I need that change.

The message here is Know Thyself. I mentally gave wyrdone a lot of shit about a month and a half ago for his opinion that people need to pay more attention to themselves, but he's very right. In the sense of introspection, and not in the sense of "buy more shit / get drunk / angst / whatever to make you feel better." I can't be happy without having some idea of what it is that makes me happy, and I can't know that without knowing why these things make me happy. And that will take some serious soul-searching.

Yeah, I know. I'm being That Guy. Possibly several varieties of That Guy all at once.

---

Taking up photography again has helped with this somewhat; it's made me actually look at things, pay attention to my surroundings. The building next to McBride (Norris? Patton?) has a little turret on the front corner nearest McBride; I'd never noticed that before this spring. There's a random arbor with a couple benches out behind one of the engineering buildings. Et cetera. When I bother to try and lift my blinders, my ability to go through life with them down impresses me.

Comments

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

(((Tucker)))

Know thyself

[cblack.livejournal.com]

What's interesting about knowing yourself is that if suddenly you want to go shopping, drinking, etc., then you can stop to consider what has changed to make you want to do something you don't normally desire doing. I, at least, since starting to pay attention to such things, have noticed that I have very definite patterns. My desire to get drunk 'means' something and the more I pay attention to these things, the easier it is to discover what is amiss. I keep meaning to begin a personal journal about it, but I'm not that far along this process to put that much energy into it yet.

[vond.livejournal.com]

yubbie worked in McBryde for months or years and just suddenly noticed the existence of the PAB one day. He actually said to his coworkers "When did they put that building there?" - then they showed him the cornerstone with 1909 or whatever on it.

I told you that I would read through the 200 entries I've missed

[vileone.livejournal.com]

We need the familiar. Almost all of life is the familiar, and that's good. Every day the sun rises. We like that. Every month the moon waxes and wanes. Every spring the trees have sex all over our cars. Without that, what would we have to talk to strangers about? It's the yellow tie that binds us all together.

You've got three thoughts here. Celebrate the familiar. Embrace change. Know yourself. They're all so important, but they're separate things entirely, and all require some moderation.

I've started three times here to say something more about each of these, but I've stopped each time. Maybe that's saying something to me that I should listen to. So all I will say is this: Live deliberately. Don't just let life happen. It's what you finally do that will leave its mark; so know why you do what you do, but do, and do on purpose.