Lately, especially after that Ares Night speech, i’ve felt drawn to inactivity. When i’m outside,i feel like i want to participate and play with people. But alone, i don’t feel drawn to doing much.
I had been interested in various subjects and cool things to experiment. I have books(ebooks) on hypnosis and other cool stuff that i can learn from. But i don’t feel an urge to do these things. I used to imagine myself a few months or years down the road as a energy healer, a hypnotist, a great footballer or various great occupations or identities. But now, there’s no urge or push to be all of these things.
Football is a funny thing. I used to base my world around it and kept thinking about how to be better at it but now i seem to really not care much about how good i am at it. I still enjoy it, but like basketball, i really don’t feel like i want to get good at it or base my life around it.
I realised how ridiculous it is when people say that they want to be a lawyer or doctor or any occupation and i get this feeling that they are basing much of their lives around it as well. Right now, i perceive all these statements as the identity people want to become and take on. When you say “I’m going to be a lawyer”, or “i’m going to be rich”, it literally means that you want to become a lawyer or a “rich person”, so your very life is based upon your role as a lawyer to the amount of money you have.
When people say they want to help people, i don’t doubt that their feelings of compassion and sympathy are genuine. But at the same time, i sense that they are also trying to make an identity of being “loving” and ‘compassionate” and are subtly boasting about how “noble” and “loving” they are.
Is that wrong?:No. It’s just ridiculous. Rather than just being yourself, you look for an identity to become, an idea of being a lawyer, or being rich, or loving, or compassionate, or noble, or cool. Is it fake of course its fake in the sense that it isn’t you.
I used to have a few of such goals. I imagined myself as being a liverpool footballer, having a very inspiring story, going around the world and giving great speeches, urging them to be courageous, to dare to chase their dreams, doing a great lot of good to the world as well as being rich, famous and cool. They weren’t entirely false nor entire genuine, neither entirely self-centered nor selfless. I genuinely wanted people to have the courage to pursue whatever they wanted and abolish their fears. At the same time, i also craved for the admiration that would come with doing such “noble” work. I thought i really wanted to be a professional footballer, but now, i know that was something i had lied myself into believing.
It’s quite crazy how you can literally lose the ability to differentiate between truth and falsehood. I lied to myself and believed those lies and i see the same thing often. People prtending to be cool and posing when they really are shitting themselves over their own insecurities. People mocking other people, labelling them as posers, implying that they are above thoughts and intentions of wantin to impress people.
But living in those lies, trying to live out those identities gave me a lot of energy and impetus to do. Do, do do, any spare time, spending it on improving my skills, plan my training, do do do. I remember a time where i would take every spare moment i had to visualize in order to train and improve my football. And after playing, i’d look back and keep thinking about the things i did, how i looked like, how i compared, what other people were thinking of me. Whenever i thought about it, i became a little bit more stressful, a little bit more anxious. It was a really crazy life i led then, but i know there are many more people leading even crazier lives.
Now, i’ve lost a lot of those urges to become a certain identity. I doubt i’ll ever reach for another identity again but i may, who knows. But now, left with no identity to reach, i seem to not know what to do. When i have free time, what should i do?
When i’m in school, there’s lots of things to do. Games to play, people to talk to, lessons to learn. But when i’m at home, there’s no urge to do anything. But at the same time, there’s an uneasiness to do something. What is it? Boredom. I didn’t feel the need to do or learn anything, so i really don’t want to do anything. Yet when i don’t do anything, i feel like i’m wasting my time, wasting away.
Ahh, but finally, i realised the answer. I thought about what a human being would do if you took him out of his cultural, social context. What if you took a scholar in ancient china and placed him in modern singapore and vice versa? Or put him in the wild, like our caveman ancestors. Besides acquiring food and water, what would he do in his free time?
I figured out that my uneasiness of doing nothing could possibly be a sort of social conditioning. I look everywhere and people are doing something. Then, i remember eckhart tolle, who said that sometimes, he just sits in stillness for 2 hours. I think what i need to learn is to be at peace with inactivity, with not-doing. Perhaps i may waste away my entire life, and i ought to be at peace with that as well. Perhaps that after a period of inactivity, like what eckhart and the tao te ching says, spontaneous action and energy will arise.
