I was checking my hard drive the other day when I came across this piece I wrote for a pen friend who shall remain anonymous. She was in her second year abroad. I got to know her through her blog. The letter/piece below forms part of our exchanges. For what it is worth, I am publishing it here unedited, except for the few sections where I have excised any information pertaining to her identity.
-----------------------------------You really didn’t mean it, did you [name], the part about “How I would have loved
such a guide in high school or college”. Granted a large terrain of your personality is unknown to me, I still have the feeling you would have resented and rejected any attempt to direct the course of your life. Besides the usual teenage rebellious spirit, it appears to me your nature is not the hero-worshipping type. You peer too closely into the nature of things and possesses too sharp an eye – and my sixth sense tells me these are not newly acquired attributes - to ignore the basic flaw that attends upon every human being, to allow yourself to be completely wowed by any person, even if they speak in tongues and announce themselves as card-carrying members of the religion that ‘Have all the Answers to Humankind’s’ problems.
And I think you would have been justified in rejecting another human being as a personal guide, if anyone had so presented themselves. No human being, not even the most experienced psychoanalyst, can know the full extent of our lives – the past, the present, and especially, the future. Who can unearth all the things that have influenced us at the most critical junctures of our lives, that is, the period of time when our personalities were taking shape and our reasoning powers were beginning to assert themselves? Even we ourselves are often hard pressed to remember the entire spectrum of actions and words of our parents, siblings, relatives, friends, and lovers that crystallized some of the most emotive forces in our lives. You know, the knowing smiles and giggles which introduced us to uninhibited bonding and fellowship; and then the hard looks, the frowns, the silly lies and the betrayals that pricked our hearts and souls at various moments and left sediments of fear, insecurity and guardedness in their stead. If we ourselves find it hard remembering all the past events and people that have shaped our lives, how do we justify giving someone outside ourselves entire direction of the same lives?
What of the present? Is it possible for someone with some knowledge of our present doings to guide us in the direction of a greater sense of selfhood? In my view, this will only be possible if the person is able to follow the labyrinth of our minds and accurately map the contours of its valleys and hills. Such a person must also possess the ability not to be misled by the subterfuges and feigns the mind puts out to ward off intruders. Furthermore, she must be able to fathom the real depth of our reigning preoccupations, the worries that gnaw at our hearts, the hurts that tugs at our spirits, and also, be able to access the dreams of the happy and contended life that sustain and buoy our spirits? Where are such persons to be found?
It is far easy to psychoanalyze people, and most of us do it all the time. It costs nothing and the repercussions are often negligible. But to really listen to someone attempt to describe their inner life and profound feelings is to sense the inadequacy of language in conveying our thoughts and feelings. Thus even those who listen closely to us are no less prone to misread us than those who psychoanalyze us from afar. We cannot easily communicate our deeply wrought feelings because the language we use allows us to communicate only a single strand of our feeling at a time, whilst it is hardly ever the case that our emotions about people and things are as easily encapsulated. You need only remind yourself of how many men have gotten the wrong impressions about your words and actions to realize how, in obeisance to the limitations of language, those who listen to us are primed to streamline, and even misinterpret, what they hear. For me then, the issue becomes, if we are so lousy at presenting the thoughts and feelings that preoccupy us, how sensible are we to think that another human being is better able to represent us to ourselves?
What of the future? Should we allow anybody else, besides ourselves, to lay the tracks and define the parameters as to what we ought or ought not do with our lives? I am of the view that unless we are handicapped by some infirmity or mental incapacity, the way we envisage our lives and conduct is ours alone to decide, not our admirers, not our teachers, not even our parents. As assuring as it feels to be loved and as comforting as the thought of having our person and ideas appreciated by others, I think that to unquestioningly allow another person to interfere with our long-term life choices is to believe that some person or group of persons has the answer to the inscrutable problems of life – the feelings of inadequacy that plagues us, the misjudgments that attend upon almost all our undertakings, the sorrows that criss-cross our lives, the loneliness that threatens to erode our psychic poise and the insecurities that pockmark every phase of our lives. No mortal being, whether in the past or now, have been able to find the answers to these quandaries and for these reason no person is worth being envied or having their lives duplicated in another, no matter how ‘intelligent’ or ‘gifted’. We each have enough of our own individual and peculiar burdens to carry to add to it viewpoints, inclinations and prejudices that dislodge us from profiting from our own life experiences. To follow others willy-nilly, to me, is to risk introducing psychic distortions and disturbances into our lives. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best in his work, Society and Solitude: “Have the courage not to adopt another's courage.”
My position is that no two lives are exactly alike, contrary to what soul-mate propagandists assert. Of course, at the most fundamental level we share much in common. We are all born (none of us voluntarily), we move from childhood to adulthood (adulthood and maturity are two different things that don’t always go together), we acquire desires (not all of which are good for us at one time or another), become partial to certain things and people (how nearly impossible it is to get rid of bad habits and toxic people), we age (how dreadful!) and then we die (sadly, but unavoidably). Between the living and the dying, however, there is much that makes us different from each other at the individual level. I am not talking here about intelligence and abilities, areas in which I am loath to argue about, having witnessed these words constantly misused. What I have in mind is the different ways we respond to material and spiritual goods. The danger in allowing others to directly interfere in our lives is that we end up abandoning our own native derived responses to material incentives and spiritual enticements and attach ourselves to preferences and choices that might not be in consonant with our true and natural instincts.
So there you have it; neither an agreeable student nor a good teacher would I be to teaching people specifically what to do with their lives.
If what I have said about the individual is true, the question then becomes how is it that people who take their lives into their own hands are no sooner set on their course than they are assailed by self-doubt, eroding self-confidence, followed by retrenchment, and acquiescence to the culture of group-think and hero-worship. In my view the reasons are as follows: we neglect to develop and deepen the spiritual content of our personalities at the most critical times of our lives, we allow impatience to govern our responses to the world and the pace of our own growth and achievements, and we insist on remaining ignorant about the true nature of the things of this world.
We fritter the best times of our lives in pursuits that take us further away from our real and genuine selves. Our times are occupied with working in the ‘professional’ environment accumulating brownie points for our career ambitions, in front of the TV watching the antics of our favorite sitcom stars (so that we can talk about them the next morning), at tacky vacations spots trying to forget about the numbing effects of our professional lives, or at scripted events where forced smiles and superficialities abound. In a word, we have the sense to set up time to do everything except spending time with ourselves, alone, thinking about the state of our souls, and the root causes of our feelings of inadequacy, uneasiness, guilt and loneliness.
Concerning our impatience, one need not look too hard. Our impatience is always on full display in almost everything we do. We show it when we demand that every assignment we become involved in must have a beginning and a closure, and that all the goals we specified at the outset of projects must be met before we consider ourselves successful. Again, we think every enterprise we undertake must proceed according to our schedule and be run according to our strategies, and that every relationship we become involve in must follow a certain script and meet certain specifications. We spoil even the time we set aside to do nothing (the vacation or fun hours) by keeping a rigid and officious pose, and a constant eye on the clock and a pulse on the ‘fun’ meter. All these ensure that we often end our vacations as exhausted as we had began it.
Our disposition and actions are all the more pitiable because our resources are quite meager compared to the force to be met with in the world. As much as we might gird ourselves to be opposed and ridiculed, the fact of our being misunderstood, opposed and ridiculed hurt and easily throw us off our course. We promptly withdraw from the field of action, feeling confused and immobilized, with a pledge never to expose ourselves to such indignities and torture again. Yet these are the very times when those who have used their time to develop a more robust psyche and better understanding of themselves and the world teach us how much we stand to gain when we take the time to cultivate and strengthen our real selves. Their understanding of the variability within themselves enable them to recognize and plan for the variability within the larger human society. Their deep and abiding understanding of the multi-faceted nature of the world – that things appeal differently to different people, and that we ourselves to do not look at the same thing in exactly the same way in different time periods – go a long way to making them less anxious about themselves and how they are perceived by others. They are free from the angst of failure and feelings of inadequacy that kill our enthusiasm because their understanding of the paradoxical nature of the world tells them that things are not always what they seem, that what appears at first sight to most of us as failures, might indeed be the harbinger of success. They husband their vital resources very well, never depleting it by exposing their delicate psychological poise to unnecessary rearguard battles with themselves.
People who take time to reflect on themselves and the world around them also, sometimes, come to another conclusion: that the environment we live in is quite indifferent to fate of the individual. This indifference arises from two sources - the constitution of the planetary system and the psychology of the human society. Science has shown beyond a doubt – at least for those of us who give credence to its claims – that humankind does not constitute the epicenter of ‘creation’, and that our ‘creation’ is the result of strange and fortuitous circumstances and that like all creations of chancy events, we are everlastingly susceptible to all the vagaries and whims of changing circumstances. Our condition is made all the more precarious by our situation vis-à-vis the larger society of which we are a part of. In all human societies, including those of so-called advanced democratic countries, the individual’s freedom is subordinate to those of the general society. Of course, the degree of freedom varies from society to society, but the fact remains that none of us is absolutely free to do whatever she or he pleases. Most importantly, we did not even have a hand in the formation of the social and economic systems that affect our lifestyle and whose justification forms the backdrop to our education and acculturation. To distinguish our individuality while using the institutions and practices created by others is one of the facts we have to contend with in life. In traditional societies [excised] the individual is totally overwhelmed by the social mores and cultural practices of the past. In the West the individual continually pokes at the seams, and occasionally succeeds in enlightening others to the canker that gathers within the superstructure. But most often the individual is at a disadvantage. Society always manages to reign in non-conformists – through peer pressure, gossips, innuendoes, pop culture, elections, etc – as it should. For in the long run the individual, whose freedom I cherish and celebrate in the short run, does not matter. She or he will die and so also will every peculiarity associated with her or him (notice how fashions come and go). Only society as a whole and the enduring values that sustain it will live on, in order to cater to the needs of the next generation. Failure to understand this dichotomy between individual freedom and society’s ‘rights of way’ can well be a source of anger and frustration. It is a disheartening realization, but not threatening at all. The fact that none of us can take ourselves out of this conundrum should serve to quieten our nerves and free us from unnecessary worries about our place in society.
All the above discussion leads me to think that you are the last person to have the need of a teacher or mentor. Whatever might have been your initial impetus for joining the [vvvv] (we all, after all, have our good, as well as, real reasons for doing what we do – don’t we?) you undoubtedly are no longer what you used to be. From what I can glimpsed of your life [ from your website,] you are several degrees removed from the person who left the shores of these United States months ago. You have had the time, and the experience, to evaluate yourself and your fellow humans. You have probably shed some tears, and also laughed some; you have questioned yourself, and been tested some. You have had the time to reflect on what ails the human society and what unites us. You have criss-crossed and zigzag your way through gender, cultural, technological, and racial boundaries. If all these do not register on the Richter scale of mental and psychological growth, then nothing will. So your vision is occasionally clouded by the ghost of cynicism and self-doubt – thank heavens for that, see what irreproachable self-assurance got us into in Iraq; so you are apprehensive about the future – show me the person who is absolutely certain about what the world beyond today will bring and I will make sure to do exactly opposite what she or he does or suggests; so you do not always live up to the best of your expectations – the time to really get worried is when you no longer feel you need to worry about your responsiveness to what happens to you, that is the time when your senses are really wasted. In effect you are the best guide for yourself.
