Peace of the Self

2 0 1 3 And The Clean Slate

2 0 1 3.

Hello! Welcome back! It’s a New Year!

Commencing obligatory New Year’s Resolutions post.

In all seriousness, though, starting a new year is great. Why not take advantage of what is – symbolically at least – a fresh start? In this very optimistic vein, I have laid out my thoughts and advice on how to achieve your New Year’s resolutions (I promise it isn’t too trite).

It’s a chance for me to bring up one of my personal maxims: Nothing has to stay the same if you don’t want it to. On that note, let me put forth some of my ideas on how to make that happen.

Put your plan on paper.

Put it on your bathroom door or mood board. A nice, clean, and most of all, positive space that creates just the right sense of attractiveness about your goals. Personalise it too. If it’s more personal, there’s more emotion invested in it. And emotion is what really ends up propelling your goals forward, instead of adhering to sheer drudgery.

I used to keep these little hand-drawn cards in my wallet that I could just take out and read when things got particularly hard in school. This is a lovely little reminder in the middle of even the crappiest day of what you are working towards. Get a friend to make you one, too. You’ll feel less alone in your courageous fight for the perfect grades or muscle tone.

Make your plan visible.

And I don’t just mean to yourself. Yes, you should stick your paper plan somewhere that is within your daily line of vision. But I also strongly encourage making your plan visible to other people.  In an age where blogging, microblogging, status updates and what-have-you, you can publish your intentions of making your life better on a medium where you will be held accountable by your friends, family, and barely-acquantainces, which will in turn give you incentive to be accountable to yourself. It’s far harder to excuse minor slip-ups when you know other people are watching your progress.

Dream about it as if it were real.

I am going to do a much more in-depth post about the meditative aspects of goal-fulfillment, but I feel that this is too important to leave out.

One of the most crucial aspects of visualization is to add as much reality to the picture as possible. I do not mean reality exclusively in terms of the senses, like sight, sound, touch, etc., but also in the way that you incorporate emotions into it.

As I said, emotions are truly what drives your success. This is simply because if you aren’t invested in a goal, it doesn’t have as much staying power, whether in your subconscious or (to my belief) the universe as a whole. You have to feel with such force that it attracts what you desire to you.

Clear the clutter.

Every year, we accumulate a lot of crap. That is a given. This can be emotional, mental, or (definitely) physical clutter. Get rid of it. It doesn’t help you in your search for X or Y. It just takes up unnecessary space in your life. Be ruthless, so that you can have the clarity of mind to make the best decisions for yourself, as opposed to being weighed down by concerns that are of the past.

Don’t discount symbolic acts.

To clear clutter, symbolic acts can be surprisingly helpful. Is clutter-clearing is a symbolic act in itself? Anyway. Two of my clearest memories were from after PSLE and O’ Levels, where I dumped all my papers, books, files into an enormous pot and set it on fire. I stained the balcony slightly, but honestly, literally burning all that pressure away was very cathartic. A chapter had closed in my life, and I was ready to move on from it. This cleared the path for me to explore new things and evolve much more as a person. Do whatever it is you want to do – write a song, run around in the rain, anything. Get whatever you need to out of your system.

Alternatively, this also works for new beginnings (a phrase that makes me think of drag queens, but anyway). Buy a piece of merchandise from your new school or workplace and place it somewhere that seems right. Remind yourself of the new phase that you are starting.

Plan for laziness.

So I try to put myself in situations where I know I won’t slack off. This usually means studying in a public place (so I can’t fall asleep), but never in a group (where the chat never really going to be as productive as it could be). Understand yourself, and in what ways you are most probably going to slip up. Don’t want to go running because you might get bug bites later? Purposely don’t apply mosquito repellent so that you have to outrun the mosquitoes. I’m a big fan of knowing yourself, and that’s how lots of successful people get where they want to go. Not necessarily through sheer willpower alone, although there is much of that. The smartest people know how to provide for their weaknesses.

Make the related activities as enjoyable as possible.

If you’re seeking an end all the time, you will most likely run out of patience midway, because the journey seems intolerable. So if you want to lose weight, take up cooking so that you can savour the food that you make, even though it might have too many vegetables for most sane people. Find some way to make the activities that seem like chores, grow into favourite pastimes. Life will be much, much easier. 

And that concludes my first POTS 2013 rumination. Thank you for reading, and it’s good to be back. New post every Sunday. Unless I try and increase the frequency. But we’ll see how that goes.

See you next week.

Overcoming Loneliness

“Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.” - Dag Hammarskjold

 “There is no company like loneliness to keep you from being at one with yourself.” - Unknown

I’m not sure why humans feel lonely. In my own experience, we are looking for an answer to the call of our hearts. That call may or may not be answered, in a way that may or may not be satisfactory. It’s why so many people with intimacy issues turn to sex – the immeasurable closeness of the act gives a brief recourse from being alone. Finally you’re one with someone else. Loneliness has to be a top ten fear for most people. It is unthinkable. Tom Hanks could barely get by in Castaway, and at least Will Smith in I Am Legend had the dog. 

I find loneliness in so many people these days – my friends, my family, people on the street. Even myself, and I’m someone who has always thoroughly enjoyed being alone. I can be shut away with myself for hours. But at one point or another, we are all lonely, be it because you’re going through something no one else can understand, or away at NS, or by yourself in a strange city where even the weather is so uncomfortably foreign that you feel disconnected from the regular rhythm of life.

This blog is about recognizing feelings like this. But it is also about positivity. Positivity as an outlook changes you, because you notice the beauty in sadness, and turn that around to create a space of only real, unadulterated happiness. With that, here are my thoughts on taking loneliness to another level, where it is striking, it is to be embraced, and it is to be turned into something else entirely.

 1. Everyone needs to wallow sometimes. Humans need to be self-indulgent. Loneliness in itself has a special kind of beauty. It’s oddly romantic, that wistfulness and yearning. Feel free to enjoy that for a while. It can even spur you to create. Honestly I like putting myself there, because it is when I feel  the most, and where my thoughts can take a poignant shape for things like fiction or song covers.

 2. But instead of staying in that negative place for too long, to the point where you start to believe it, know when to pull back. Know at which point you need to go watch a parody on Youtube or leave the house to surround yourself with outside life. Or just go to sleep. A lot of the time I’m just tired or cranky. The dawn of a new day can make yesterday’s problems seem ridiculously insignificant.

 3. Eventually I think we need to come to grips with what loneliness represents – the fact that perhaps another person’s soul can never connect completely with yours. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I don’t believe it is necessarily a bad thing. Yes, it does make you feel utterly alone in some respects. In many. In most. Speech, song or art doesn’t convey a person’s soul – not really. Not in its entirety.

 But if you look at it from a different perspective, well, the one person you will always be connected to is yourself. You will always know you. So if you’ve been left alone, well, you have yourself to keep you company. Think about it. You’re pretty interesting. Why rely on the presence of somebody else or many somebody elses to determine your level of happiness? If we realize that we can always count on ourselves, loneliness would effectively be eradicated. We would continue to desire others, because humans do like company. I’m not advocating a hermitical lifestyle. But just that you should get to decide if you’re feeling good. Actively decide to love yourself.

 Frankly, I like spending time with myself. Peaceful solitude is something I seek. But of course, that’s not the same thing as loneliness. Yet by experiencing loneliness, and realizing that it is an internal feeling, you have the power to turn it into peaceful solitude any time you like. If it is internal, well, don’t you have the power to change it any time you want to? it doesn’t exist outside of your mind. A feeling is not who you are. A feeling is something that can pass, and something that can be utterly yours to control.

 4. That peaceful self-time can be immensely productive as well. It’s the perfect chance to develop into a better version of yourself. Take up a new language, do things that your friends aren’t that into. Spend time thinking about who you would like to be.

 5. Help somebody. You never know what loneliness is until you see someone down and out with no family, no friends, and no job. Is your situation really that bleak? It will also make you feel better for doing a good deed. I am strongly of the belief that a good deed makes you feel more at peace with yourself. Do a good deed that you want to do, and that fits in with your idea of what living a good life is, because if you take action without believing in it, it will not have the same ring of truth to it.

6. Just go ahead and talk to someone. Find a friend and let them know that you’re feeling lonely, and they’ll help you take your mind off of it. You’re probably not alone. Not really. Maybe they’re feeling lonely too. You don’t have to be all self-improve-y all the time. Friends are actually there for a reason. In the end, yes, you want to be independent, you want to be self-reliant. But you don’t have to get there by ignoring the fact that you have good people who will have your back at every turn.

7. Find someone new to talk to. It may or may not be successful. But it could open you up to new experiences and the way someone else lives their life, which is always interesting. Food for thought.

Loneliness is a universal emotion. There’s nothing wrong with that. Strive to be the best person you can be, but accept that nothing natural is perfect. What natural is, is an embracing of diversity and imperfection. But it shouldn’t rule you, and let you believe that you are worthless in any regard. Take time to affirm yourself, and even let your friends stroke your ego occasionally. Yes, you can master yourself, and your internal experience. Loneliness may be a universal emotion, but an emotion is never a circumstance. Understand that you can control that.