Tuesday, August 29, 2006

The illusion of safety

There's a scene in Fight Club I have always been particularly fond of. In this scene, Tyler Durden and Jack are discussing the illusory nature of the airline crash procedure documentation. A series of panel images is put on camera featuring lineart humans in various stages of airplane crash preparation looking calm and placid, as if they are doing yoga exercises or meditation. Later in the film, Project Mayhem replaces said pamphlets with Tyler's more honest representations of what would actually be happening in a crash; namely chaos, panic and the fiery deaths of the plane's passengers.

And so it is that I have had some of my own illusions of safety corrected, not by a nihilistic genius, but by life and its various revealing moments. For most of my existence I resided outside the norm, emotionally and physically detached from my peers and humanity at large. I kept the world at more than arm's distance, like one would a wild carnivore or diseased vagrant. In my mind, this was the high and honorable course; my own personal means to an enlightened end. Of course, disconnection is really a measure of avoidance, not a method of transcendence, but for years, I was ignorant of this truth.

Honestly, in reflection, it was as much my answer to fear and insecurity as it was a product of my want of independence and some form of differentiation. It wasn't until my mid-20s that I really started letting people in and the result has been a crash course education in what it means to be human. I have been elevated, aggravated, denounced, praised, hurt and healed. These things have only happened to me because of my active and honest involvement with the people who come in and out of my life. I touched their lives as they touched mine and I have learned a great deal about myself because of these contacts.

One such lesson is that my answer has never been safe and secure disassociation, because no honest answers are realized through fear or avoidance. Truths lie in real and sincere interaction, because in the end I believe the knowledge we glean from each other is irreplaceable and impossible to attain in any meaningful form by sterilized observation alone. I have only come to understand this very recently and it is part of the background behind my previous, much more vague post.

We cannot dwell in the darkness of fear and hope to learn courage. We cannot sit in place and hope to move the world around us. There is no ascension in descending into fearfulness or cynicism, just as there is no clarity in looking at the world through muddied glasses. All is lost if we do not engage and explore. This doesn't mean exploring in the contemporary sense, i.e. fucking up and using the exploration as an excuse for making said mistakes. What I am talking about is reasoned, rational, considered work within the confines of our current reality in pursuit of a dream or vision.

That is the piece I hold onto most dearly, the most important of the things I value in this life. We will all make mistakes, it is inevitable, but so long as we continually press forward with a positive vision and an engaged mind, these mistakes become sources of knowledge and energy for our continued progress. So I fully intend to keep pushing and recognize the illusion that has been safety. Despite my best efforts to be perfectly safe and secure in a micro-castle of my own making, I have been unable to avoid reality. Life finds us, even if we would hide and avoid it, because in the end, we are meant to live above all other things. Denying that is a prolonged death in and of itself.

From the time of my first memories to this moment in time, there has been no real safety. My reality was once a restricted and sterilized one, guided as much by fear as by moral vision. Where the vision remains and actually grows stronger within me, the fear is dying deaths day-to-day and I intend to keep severing its numerous tentacles until it is nothing more than a limbless stump with no hold or control of me whatsoever. I cannot imagine my life not being better for the effort!

I still dream of building my distant, proverbial pyramid, but now that dream is inspired more by optimism than escapism or despair. Being apart as a way to expand one's understanding of one's self is a benefit and in some ways a need. Sheltering ourselves up and throwing away the outside world is a cowardly act and ultimately nothing more than a form of self limitation. There is so much to learn here, disengaging entirely would only hurt our chances of really knowing anything. For those of us who dream of knowing everything there is to know about life and love and spirit, the only option is to actively engage and explore. Doing so puts us at risk, but facing risk is as much a part of the life process as eating and sleeping.

Great lives are littered with risks taken, challenges overcome, pain endured and personal triumphs. If we are to live a great life on whatever scale that is available to us, we must face our fears, take risks that matter and test our mettle in reality. We will succeed, we will fail and we will learn. This seems almost inevitable as death and taxes to me now and much more rewarding, in the end.

Posted by Erik @ 8/29/2006 09:37:00 AM