Digging

I am the type of person whose mind circles around quotes. Often too unoriginal or too lazy to come up with my own thoughts, I use other people's and just connect the dots so that their words apply to my own situation. This means that I am very good at writing history and political science essays, but lack at other types of writing.

Snowed in this past week at my parent's house, I had to start digging out. Digging through old shoe boxes and stuffed manila envelopes with my name on them. They were stuffed with poems, short stories, e-mails, lyrics, and short summations of various political and philosophical theories. Most of these things were given to me by one person who had a very big impact on the way I thought all throughout high school, I am sure I still think of many things the way he taught me to. About half-way through one stack I found two sheets of yellow paper stapled together. The first was titled 'Quotations of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900.' These were short, succinct one-liners that must have had some sort of impact on me (or him?) at the time. The second page looked at first like a continuation of Nietzsche, there was no title or anything to distinguish otherwise, but after reading a few quotes I decided that these were very clearly not him. Here is one that caught my eye:

Learn to detach. Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent. Detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That's how you are able to leave it. Take any emotion--love for a woman, or grief for a loved one.... If you hold back on the emotions--if you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. You can say, "All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion. I don't have to let it control me. I see it for what it is. Detach.

(By the way, I Googled this and found that it is a quote that, although I hate to admit it, is from Tuesdays with Morrie.)

I think that up until very recently this quote would have been one that I would have adopted as summation of my personal character. Had it not gotten lost in stacks of other quotes, I am sure that I would have typed it up, printed it out, hung it on a bulletin board in my room, and spouted its wisdom to anyone who would let me talk for a few minutes.

I remember about a year ago, driving back from a family Christmas party of a friend that I was visiting, sitting in his Jeep and telling him about how I was convinced that everything that anyone did was motivated out of fear. He looked at me disappointed and said that he didn't think so, and that he hoped I really didn't think that. Maybe that was just me I was talking about, it's hard to tell.

Now I am at a different point though. The thought of detachment makes me sicker than the thought of the pain of all of those different emotions. I want to feel those things fully, completely, dirtily, and I want to hold onto them and not let them go. Like a mother protecting her babies, I want to savagely clutch them to my breast, and desperately fight off anyone who tries to tell me to put them down. I am tired of letting these things go. I want to feel them with or without fear of propriety, disappointment, or regret. I want to let them consume me; I want to stay in bed with these emotions all day, feeding them and not myself. I don't want to compromise, I don't want to be rational, and I don't want to settle. I want to travel around the world chasing it, I want to be made a fool of.

Arg, I don't know, maybe it's just the season to be thinking these sorts of things. To quote my brother (who, knowing him, may have been quoting the Simpsons):

"Don't worry, it's the holidays, you're supposed to feel like crap."