As I’ve read through my blogs, I’ve realized I am definitely all over the place – to the point where I have lost myself, and I’m the guy that wrote it – so I apologize for my creative misgivings, but not really whole-heartedly. I can’t really promise that my blogs will get much better or much more focused, but hopefully I can make it a bit more concentrated on one topic – although I would say my previous musings are what are making me write this piece. As cliché as it sounds, it takes staring at your mistakes point blank, your shortcomings straight up, and your tumbling fallacies in the light of day, before you can start to reinvent yourself. So I think the core belief in this blog is that sometimes it is necessary to completely fail and fall before you can reinvent yourself. If a part or facet of you is still working, then most of us will cling on for dear life to that part and see how long we can sustain it. But perhaps only recently, I am starting to find that sometimes it’s better to let your life go to shambles, so that you can start building fresh and new, rather than trying to sustain a dilapidated hodgepodge that might function, but it’s not what you want.
As an analogy, I want you to think about a dirty room. You can bear to live in the room for some designated amount of time, but after enough time has transpired, you will feel that the room is now inhabitable and disgusting to the point where you will embark on a thorough cleaning (a cleaning far more rigorous and fruitful than the one you would have done at the beginning of the mess) – cleaning everything from laundry to dust to old papers, and now you will have a fresh new room to mess up all over again. This to me seems like the more fulfilling option rather than having a mediocre clean room and picking up a dirty shirt every other day –within that particular environment you would never be pushed to the idea of total cleansing because it is clean enough, therefore contentment would outweigh ambition. However, like all my blogs, this is simply my opinion, not something I feel you must agree with. Yet, I do want to talk about reinventing yourself or rebuilding your life.
Reinventing yourself is a phenomenon that I find frustrating, fascinating, and futile all at the same time – probably because I have tried to reinvent myself at least 17 times in the last three years. Many a great philosopher or statesman has said their piece on rebuilding or reinventing yourself, probably the best of which was “The greatest gift we have as humans is not so much in reinventing our cities, but rather in reinventing ourselves.” This particular quotation was likely an amalgamation of different Gandhi maxims, but I like it for its holistic nature. It seems to place so much merit in the fact that we can change. Change has become a buzz word within the last two years, partly due to politics, partly due to the idea that perhaps people are finally starting to embrace the idea that change is not something that is simply going to happen, but something that already has. Yet my biggest problem with reinventing yourself is not that we do not have the right vision for what we want to change, it is that we as a people do not have the discipline to make it consistent.
We are, we always have been, and I think we will continue to be “creatures of comfort” a group honed in on pleasure seeking, self-gratifying, and desiring the envy of others. Up until we have hit that critical point where the shit has hit the fan, we decide to close our noses and continue our patterns of behavior. Very few watershed moments in history have caused us to totally abandon something the way it is and start rebuilding, and I would say the same would be true for our lives. Sometimes it takes a bad accident on the road before we become better drivers. Sometimes it takes making a really stupid mistake when inebriated to realize that you need to not drink so much. However, many times when we decide we are going to reinvent ourselves, we don’t do it at the right time because we haven’t truly hit rock bottom. We always feel that something needs to change perhaps because of our sense of ethics. But that’s just it - we feel that things need to change. We want things to change. But feeling and wanting it aren’t enough. Those are temporary entities that shift and morph with time. What we need sometimes to really bring about a solid change or a legitimate reinvention of ourselves is to have completely fucked up. When we reach that point where we feel real pain and disgust at our situation the way it is, then it will be the time that is ripe for rebuilding and rebuilding in a way that will not just be temporary.
That instant will be the jarring moment, the climax if you will, when we realize that certain aspects of the life we have been living cannot continue to be replicated because we abhor them. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So when we finally reach the point where we can either choose to be insane or do something different, most of us then choose the “do something different” path. Therein lays the homage to the title of this blog – the Jenga Tower. The game that so many of us played as children was not without its prophetic message – your tower will stand for a while, even as you dismantle it, but at some critical point, the entire tower will fall and you will have to rebuild it all over again – stronger, straighter, and wiser. And perhaps the second time you play, you realize which blocks should not be removed so quickly so that you give yourself a little more time before it all falls again – but ultimately it will fall again, and you will rebuild it again, but that is the beauty of the game, and the beauty of our life – perhaps we should let ourselves fall so that we can rebuild, but this idea that the rebuilding should only happen once so we can be done with it – well, even as adults now we sometimes want to believe the fairy tale even if it’s not true.
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