Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Who do you want to be?

I think most people have a vision of who they'd like to be- their personal model for perfection.  And their entire life is made to slowly approach that vision of perfection, but never reach it.  The vision changes, the path is tricky, and people are imperfect, so no one really can reach that place- at least not in this lifetime.  
The funny thing is, we are already that person.  We are that person when we sit alone in our rooms thinking on the world, we are that person when no one else knows we are.  Circumstance takes away our perfection, each individual choice and broken compromise to that perfection takes us away from that Giant.  It's easy to maintain the right personal standards when no one is looking and when we don't look down the muzzle of a gun with each personal choice.  
Because we don't exist as a person at any time except for this very moment.  
I have known people to make rash judgements concerning people when they choose to boil them down to very simple characteristics.  Oh, he's lazy, or she's gossipy.  But that is untrue, because when we look at a person in the grander scheme of life, they cannot be known by just that one characteristic.  We are complicated beings made of complicated chemicals and thoughts and awareness.  But to another person, we only exist in the moments they experience us, we only exist as their personal perception perceives.  So when perception becomes an issue, we make the decision to part with our perfection for a moment, but that moment is all that exists.

And again, I failed to make a point.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

What is happiness?

Happiness is a more abstract concept than most people recognize.  It is illogical and it doesn't have set prerequisites; some of the most successful people are miserable, and many of the most poor and down-trodden find glimmers of happiness in important places.  I think it must have become a biological imperative not just for the human being to be able to feel the full gamit of emotions, but to have to feel them.  The human body has to cycle through all of its states or it becomes overburdened somehow, it becomes too much of one state to take.  We are not made to live on the plateau of happiness.  In fact, it is only because the troughs that we can truly experience the divine.  
In all of my most memorable musical experiences, whether I was creating the music or standing in audience to its creation, there were moments of extreme feeling- plateaus created by harmonic activity, dynamics, and other less tangible features.  But the music wasn't created to stay there; those moments are rare in comparison to the general attitude of the music, and for good reason.  Musicians and listeners alike become over indulged in constant peaks, grow weary, and out pops the tylenol.  
The general dull of everyday life is the great canvas we live in, with little spouts of divine color at the most important moments.  The birth of a child, the rush of love, the loss of love- these are the colors made to contrast the general grey of life.  And this isn't even just concerning happiness, any high is too high to be maintained too long.  We are meant to eventually sober ourselves and come back to the plane of business as usual.  True, for some it's possible to maintain a more elevated state for longer, but everyone has a personal comfort zone. 
And this has really been an aside to a personal question I've had for a long time, namely, "Am I happy?"  When I go to sleep at night, am I happy?  Not am I proud of what I've accomplished, not do I think I'm a good person, no did I have a good time today, but "Am I happy?"  Because, even though these are obvious contributors to happiness, they are not happiness.  The happiness is made by each individual in their head, in some personal equation we can never understand.  And while the individual variables might be high in quantity, when the general equation is set up to yield low results it will be increasingly difficult to find real happiness.  
But I don't really know.  I probably think too much, and I still haven't made any point in this post.