Things Difficult to Comprehend

are usually the things most worthy of the effort—or this has been my experience at least. Right now I am struggling with a combination of Sartre, Debord and Burroughs all attempting to convince me that I am being objectified unwittingly by the world outside of me, and they are all, in their ways, at least a little bit right. They’re all coming at it from different perspectives (the objectifying characteristic of “the gaze,” the objectifying reality of commoditization, and the viral aspect of a pre-recorded reality being imposed on me as simply the object of a fantastic audience respectively), and I’m having a bit of trouble sorting it all out, but this is precisely where I feel like I am accomplishing the most important work of my life.

I am beginning to see that things are worth as much time as you put in to understanding them. If it takes five minutes, it’s probably only worth about five minutes of your time, and if it takes a lifetime, well, maybe it was worth it, or, if you’d prefer: obviously it was worth it to you. Now, there is a bit of a trouble encountered any time one goes around ascribing worth to anything, because of the nature of objective realities and the different values of worth placed on different things by different peoples at different times in different areas of the world, and it’s just all so different; however, what we’re dealing with here is precisely the objective reality of our time. It is impossible to escape time because we are the ones who bring it into the world. Without me, I have no time and it wouldn’t matter, but as I am here, time exists, and I am therefore placed in a position where I can use it as I will. This is where things get hairy.

People use their time for all manner of things. Obviously, one of the most prevalent uses of time is the television, and this particular manner of using ones time has officially gained my unceasing and unerring antipathy. It is the world of pure entertainment shining its light into your living room: a distraction from your possibility. Perhaps this will be taking it too far for some people, but the fact of the matter is, in my reality, television is a huge waste of time. I started noticing that the only programs I really enjoyed watching were edifying: nature programs, PBS, and anything that stimulated my mind to further investigation. This, though, could be accomplished without the aid of television by virtue of books and reading—which has come to illustrate itself to me as the path to all knowledge (well, that and experience, but once again, how can you experience something if you’re watching CSI?) once I realized that ninety-nine point nine percent of all classes in the world are based on a book. Reading and learning is the theory that allows one to go out and experience the world fully.

Yes, there are two corollary realities here that must be illustrated in order to be thorough: it is possible to learn things from television, and it is possible to read something for mere entertainment. What I would say in response to both of them is that while it is possible, the fact is that the balance is usually very heavily on the television as entertainment and reading as learning. Ninety percent of all television channels will be showing some kind of sitcom or drama or something else equally mind-numbing, and it could easily be shown that there are more books being used in more classrooms across the world than could possibly be contained in any structure. Think of the elementary school textbooks, the middle school textbooks, the high school textbooks, and the college books all over the world, and the scale is suddenly and unalterably shifted in the direction of reading for learning and edification.

(It could even be argued to some extent that reading for pleasure can be an edifying purpose because the brain is still being forced to connect everything. This is actually one of the big pushes in literary circles right now: bringing back the idea of reading because you enjoy something. Something happens in the brain when we read because we are not programmed with the ability to do it—while we are pre-programmed with the ability to comprehend sounds and mimic them—and we must learn a system of symbols and how to decipher them. It’s fascinating stuff, really, the things that happen has a result of the simple act of reading.)

The other major way we learn is through experience. Now, there is a little bit of a turnaround here in that the more theory we have behind us (i.e. the more reading and learning and edification we have behind us propping us up), the better we are at experiencing and understanding our world. I have been having a personal struggle lately with a breed of people that I have come to term as moral-less storytellers. First, this is not in the sense of “morality,” and I want to get that out of the way right up front. What I mean is that there seem to be a lot of people out there who experience a number of things. As a matter of fact, there is an incredible amount of people out there with vastly more experience than I (in my meager twenty-five-odd years of existence) could probably accumulate; however, when they recount their adventures, they have learned nothing. I did this. I did this. I did this. Then, I did this. Action is one thing, but if I know anything about action, it’s that when you’re doing something, you’re bound to be learning from it, and if you’re not, then you are simply going through the motions. As one develops a better sense of the ways in which the world works, through a wide variety of theory, one can better develop a sense of the possibility of existence, because the fact of the matter is that anything is actually possible. Train the mind to train the body to train the mind: practice making connections, practice sitting and reading instead of watching television, and practice running instead of watching a movie, because we become what we practice every day. If you practice watching TV, you will become very good at it. If you practice watching mindless movies, you will become very good at it. If you practice the guitar every day, you will become good at it. If you practice reading every day, you will become very good at it. If you practice fully existing every day, you will become very good at it.

I practice learning. I learn when I read. I learn when I write. I learn when I play guitar. I learn whenever I can. I’m getting better at it as a result of my practice. One of these days, I hope to be an expert learner. I don’t know why it is, yet, that practice does what it does, except I know that it is training the body and the mind to work together, and that is always preferable to them not having to do work, because that only leads to atrophy. If you take as the object of your time reading, experience, learning, developing, and growth, the outcome will continually be a transcendence of the self. You are a universe of possibility.