The Moon Bear Blog

Today, while better than yesterday, left me feeling quite demoralized. As the world seemingly spins deeper into anger and chaos, I grapple with feeling like everything I have tried to do in life, every worldly thing I have tried to make meaningful, every daily aim and life ambition seems largely futile.

I am not sure if my life has had any real positive or lasting impact on anyone aside from a tiny selection of family members, who, at times, are too preoccupied with their own daily struggles to take time to listen to me moan about my feelings of irrelevance. And, not having been the model of virtue I wanted to be, I am not sure if that impact is positive or just another kind of burden I am placing on myself or others. Of course, I turn to God in the worst of these moments and pray that my life—whatever I am building of it—will have a use in the greater scheme, to preserve me from sinking into a morass of selfish meaninglessness, but I lack the confidence and the vision to see positive effects or trust they are somehow there. As I get older, I sense the time to turn things around, to start anew, slipping away.

In some sense, it is a fight for identity. I remember how earnest an involved my parent’s generation was in the seventies. Like every young generation, the best of them had an insatiable appetite to move the world, to make a mark; but now in their senior years, all that effort seems somehow vain. What became of those youth? They had families, got jobs, and day-by-day became preoccupied with whatever the next was that was coming. How did this happen? Did their selfish desires dilute their aspirations? Like some soldiers fighting in wars, were they defeated in their virtuous and metaphysical goals and overcome by the onslaught of the mundane? My own mind struggles to understand this process, and maybe myself.

As a man in my twenties, I thought of myself as a talented person with a lot of potential for worldly success. I chose certain opportunities that I thought would lead me there: college, relationships, movements, arts, etc. I read many of the classic novels of the 19th century looking for insight, hoping to glean some wisdom of our shared humanity in the past. All seemingly for naught. Now, approaching my own senior-hood, in the isolated days of our quarantine against this current virus, I find myself alone and lonely. I talk with my parents for only ten minutes a day, if that long. I pleasantly make small talk with this one and that one who I encounter in my straitened routines. I order fast food and say “thank you” to the woman in the window passing me a bag of food that I feel guilty eating. I talk to myself a lot when reading alone in the morning.

And, when I finally choose to go home and sleep at the extermity of the night, I lay in bed wondering if there is some bit of wisdom, some secret to a better life that I have missed along the way.

Unfortunately, I also realize that many of my frustrations are almost entirely based on not reaching the material success that my society held up as the standard. Leo Tolstoy chose the life of a peasant, but managed to write novels that are held up today as a pinnacle of literary arts. I am just a poor fool realizing that his attachment to material signifiers of success causes frustrations that prevent him from doing any other than becoming bitter and irritated. Why can’t I just give up this feeling for more than I have or asking for that small bit of something I feel that I lack? I don’t want to be a famous billionaire, but maybe, my darkened heart whispers coldly, if only I had a nice home, a wife and kids, a successful career, I wouldn’t be so unhappy? If I could afford a place and car of my own, for example, if I could hide in a corner of comfort away from the world, a bunker of material comfort as the embers of chaos and anger in society seethes into a slowly building century-long revolution, then I could escape from the darkened terrors from both within and without.

But, finally, even as these frustrations bubble in my chest, I voice these thoughts aloud and hear nothing but the crying of a little baby trying to wean itself into spiritual maturity. Intellectually, I know that none of those signs of success held up by society brings the release from frustration that I seek. Aside from that, nothing is given if it is not earned. I should, I tell myself, work hard without expectation of reward and see what I can make of my circumstances. It is virtuous, I tell myself, to release one’s emotional being from the attachments to the world and the praises of the foolish who would see those attachments as accomplishments. If only (only!) I could be a Mr. Spock and control all the emotional responses that rise up during my daily life, then all would be well. Or, at the very least, I would know that I was making noble choices in the face of ongoing, world encompassing, afflictions and tumultuous feelings. But it is just so damn hard to *feel* better despite all this “knowledge.” The gulf between knowing something and feeling it in one’s soul is very deep and very wide.

Socrates says that the soul must master the body as a driver controls a horse driving a cart. The soul ignores the pull of bodily desires and emotions and chooses its path, knowing which goal is truly appropriate and desirable. “No,” the driver says to the bright bit of tasty clover the horse might see along the side of the road, “No” to shying away from the travelers coming the other way, rather going ever onward towards the city before nightfall. The city of hope, of true accomplishment, and of unity with the One Beloved by all. By God, I will train this horse out of my frustrations, but it so tiring sometimes, and I must not lash out who happen to be near. Please God I may achieve it.

Not too sure what I am doing just yet with this site. I have owned my site for about eight years, but have not done much with it yet.  So, when I had to re-register and pay for another year of service from the server host, I got to thinking that it was finally time that I do something more than just look at a static site very, very rarely.

Which leads me to this thought: graduate students at universities often tell themselves a similar tale—all of the years of work they put into writing a thesis, the thousands of hours and research, sometimes extending over a period of years, is finally compiled one-day into a book of unique, specialist knowledge, which is placed in the library and quickly forgotten about. If their thesis is read even three times in the next thirty years, it will be a miracle. My website feels like that graduate student story. Like those graduate students compiling all of their research into a 70 page thesis, I too am nearly positive that what I write isn’t all that interesting. I feel certain that no-one will ever read any of this: at least no-one aside from myself and a lost stranger or two passing by who might catch a post or two on the internet, or whatever has become of the internet. Ultimately, everything passes into a timeless oblivion anyway.

But I am not writing this with any kind of “name” or “fame” in mind. I am writing it to preserve, for myself at least, the memory of who I am, what I thought on a particular day, and the document of myself interacting with the world as it was. Maybe, my writing will get better? Who knows.

At this moment: I am a man in my late forties. I am living with my aging parents, whose health is decent but declining. I am educated with a bachelor’s degree in English, but I am financially poor with a ton of debt. As far as work is concerned, I never got a teaching degree (Masters), so my skills, such as they are not very saleable. I did earn an associate’s degree in graphic design and interactive media to try and get more saleable skills, but the markets where I live are flooded by people with similar skills, and the things I have learned in school are somewhat obsolete now. While I do have a job for the moment working for the family, my future is uncertain.

The core of who I am is a man who is worried about himself, the world, and his place in it. I take my personal attributes seriously. I think I have learned, the hard way, that the best part of ourselves is how we carry ourselves and interact with a world that is even more uncertain than I am. I am grateful for a code of personal behavior that is generous towards the needs of others, the rights of the community’s need for the common good, and my  ultimate hope for the future. If I had a magic wand, I might wish for a wife and kids, the means to amply provide for both materially and otherwise, and the connection to a greater personal purpose serving the world of humanity. I am vague because I understand this is the internet, and so far, the internet means forever. There is more to say, but this is enough for now.