You Can't Be Too Good

because the world just simply won’t allow it. You can be as awesome as you like—even if it is in your own mind. It is even possible to have everyone around you telling you how incredible you are (and I guess I’m thinking specifically about the celebrity circle there), but still manage to wind up feeling the next day as if God had unceremoniously scraped you off his hiking boot after looking down and saying, “Ewww….”

I’m not sure about karma. There seems to be something to it, and I suppose that’s where we can leave it off. What I am almost absolutely certain about is balance and the power of the human will to exert some kind of control over their universe—and I want to emphasize that THEIR. How does one go about explaining a bodily understanding like that? Everything moves in circles? Karmic principles dictate? The Middle Way? Almost every culture in almost every part of the world has some sense of the harmony that can be achieved by human beings simply being aware of the power they have over their own reality. Based on the information I have researched, the amount of water saved by one human being doing their best to conserve water in every way is in no way going to help out with our current international water crisis because the amount of water saved is too insignificant; however, it can have an effect on the local environment, and with enough individual efforts pooled together, enough environments could be salvaged, and suddenly the impossible is merely the improbable.

A lot of life is about imagination. Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that can understand something like possibility. My old professor used to hate this word, but they have somehow managed to be imbued with possibility. As a matter of fact, this is generally the problem that most human beings run into: they understand possibility, so they spend most of their lives being something they aren’t and not being what they are because they are so little focused on reality. It’s not a problem in the technical sense of, “You’ve got problems buddy, no doubt at all about that,” but more like a problem in that it creates conflict in the essential nature of the human character. Sartre likes to use the example of a waiter in a café. The man is very busy being a waiter (which is something he’s not) and very busy not being himself (a struggling artist or some such), so that at the end of the day, we spend most of our lives involved in an act that we are fully conscious of, but about which we can really do nothing about, and don’t really want to do anything about because it is through this fissure that we accomplish things, where the possible becomes reality, and a new possibility opens up.

It’s a matter of reality, see?
We cannot know what’s real because it is impossible.
Like always doing anything.
It’s not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t.

The past is subjective at best,
And can only be referred to as my past or his past or
Something along those lines,
But by days end we see how impossible the past is.

The present does not exist as
We think it does. Focusing on the moments you can
Control is probably one of the
Best ways to go about existing, but there is no way to
Grasp the moment in your hand
Because by the time you think you got it, it’s vanished.

The future is unknowable—
An old personal adage with the simple qualifier at
The beginning of “only act”—
And can only be slowly worked and moved toward.

So with an un-objective past
An elusive, at best, present,
And an unknown future, how
Are we supposed to know
What’s real?

The problem is the same all over the place. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and we are fully conscious that we have no idea what is going on inside us, while at the same time being fully conscious that we know what’s going on inside us is probably most closely related to turmoil of one kind or another. So, we sometimes set ourselves up for the self-flagellation that sometimes happens. We do things (perhaps subconsciously, but still in the consciousness) that we know, at some point down the road, we’re going to have to pay for, and we accept them wholeheartedly because we know there is a balance. It works the other way, too. Sometimes you work really, really hard. Sometimes you work to the point of pain. Sports might be a good metaphor here, in that you will work until your body is yelling at you, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Why are you doing this to us!” but you just keep right on going, and it learns to take the pain, because the glory you will receive through the competition is worth it. Pain now for pleasure later or pleasure now for pain later—it’s like the quintessential text of anything. Only a fool would make the claim that you can enjoy a life of pleasure forever.

What’s important is to remember that no matter how many father-figures you lose or many hours overtime you’re working that you’re not getting paid for or how many times your schedule changes or how many times you spill Jameson on your computer or how many times the world plays magician and has you looking at its left hand while taking a huge swing at you with its right or how many times your internet unexpectedly goes out or how many times you are so confused with the nature of your own existence that you cry and cry and cry and cry, you’ll hit a balance. You might only hit it like a miler hits the line after the first lap, but you’ll hit it, and “that’s life. That’s what all the people say. Ridin’ high in April, shot down in May. But I ain’t gonna let it change my tune. When I’m back on top in June.” I just hope it doesn’t take that long to get back on top.