Lesson #38 - On Being Incomplete

How badly designed this space for feet and falling, fucking and all that is, is.

Dug through the closets today, and in artfully dodging the spring cleaning that needed doing, sorted through my angsty teen scribblings stored in dads old leather briefcase. *shudder* I thought my writing standard was sub par now.  

I didn't write it that long ago. I still remember the unrelenting despair, the heart that broke on a daily basis in disappointment at how people were, how the world was.

My solution was strange.

I live a life that somewhat approximates asceticism. I eat mainly plain meals, almost the same thing everyday, chosen carefully in order to avoid any nutritional deficiencies, and maximize benefits to mood and energy. I sleep on the floor, trained myself to sleep flat on my back, with only a pillow beneath my knees. I use my electronics, my clothes and everything else until it is beyond repair, or stolen - which happens surprisingly often. My last three phones were stolen. Those three phones lasted me about 10 years, altogether.

The wind once flung some of my clothes that were drying on the balcony off to the nearby hills. That prompted a shopping trip. I once sat on a nail which ripped into my jeans, that prompted a shopping trip. Very little else does.

The laptop I type this on is now 7 years old. Windows XP. Yet, I'm a techie. I can go from never having laid hands on a gadget or new operating system, to showing other people how to use it, or helping them fix a problem with it in minutes.

If you're like most people I know in real life, you're thinking "What the hell is wrong with her?"

For the longest time, I was trying to strip everything away to find out what lay beneath. That's always been my way - the first electric guitar I bought at age 13 ended up completely taken apart and laid out carefully on the rug in the living room. The rust, I spent hours cleaning, I looked at every piece, and then I put it all back together again. The upside is, I never had to send that secondhand beater of a guitar to someone else for repairs, I always knew how to fix it because I knew how it worked.

I figured life was like that too. So I tried to take it apart.

Image source: bitrebels.com

But there was a problem. There were missing pieces. Try as I might, I couldn't take everything apart and make sense of it. Some things did work wonderfully though.

The food I ate (after some experimentation) seemed to allow me to roughly tune the mysterious clockwork that regulates my moods. I am a funambulist of my own moods, though lacking in the finesse of such... Ok, you got me, I just wanted to use the word funambulist, because it's been frolicking around in my head recently.

Sleeping on the floor means that despite being a full time writer who hunches over her 7 year old overheating 17" monstrosity (with a couple of keys that don't work until you lean an elbow on them) for both work and play, I am back pain free. Peers my age who work at computers all day long and go home to play on computers like I do are getting back problems serious enough to warrant lots of expensive treatment and back pain aids for "support" and such. I do concede that I may simply be lucky, or too young - so we shall see if this holds.

Not shopping has enabled me to afford freedoms that most my age cannot afford. I'm not one to give financial advice, but I think the best way to get rich is to need less things... To me it seems like you can instantly be richer with the same income that way.

But there are pieces missing.

I have contentment often. It is incomplete, and impermanent like everything else. There are days when I long for new shiny gadgets and carefully dressed people who say things that sound impressive to fill the emptiness...  Even though I have realized how unimportant those things are, sometimes, I want them.

Every time I go to sleep with this on my mind, I wake up with the same thing ringing in my head.

To live is to be incomplete.

Somehow, merely being alive means that one is forever incomplete. Food is needed, air, water, other people, animals, things, their reactions to you... filling the void is the only mission of every living person. To live is to be incomplete, and to forever seek to fill a void that can never be filled.

No matter how much I take apart and lay pieces carefully down on the floor, there is always more to take apart. If you were wondering what the conclusion of this lengthy ramble is... I shall predictably say that this post will remain incomplete.

I've got some disassembling to do.