Classes

I startled myself today with the realization that I’m pretty sure I have never left university. What I mean is that the habits I developed in university have stayed with me since then, possibly more than any other time in my life.

Normally, especially with the way most university students go about living, this might not be the healthiest or most advantageous form of living on the face of the planet, but my particular manifestation of it has some interesting quirks. The imbibing of intoxicating chemicals is still around, but in a far, far, far… um, far diminished form. That’s what university is about isn’t it: let’s drink until we can’t feel feelings any more five nights (and sometimes days) a week. Ah, well, you grow up eventually, and a couple of post-work relaxation beverages covers your needs with maybe a heavy night on the weekend for fun.

There is also still the tendency to keep late hours. This is not anything new for me really because I have been a chronic insomniac since I was in middle school; however, what I learned about myself in university is that if I exhaust myself absolutely thoroughly in both a mental and a physical way, sleep will come. As I thought it was very important to study before playing, and there was usually a lot of wrestling practice before studying, this actually worked out pretty well for me. I would be exhausted from working that day (I worked two part-time jobs), going to classes, going to wrestling practice, and spending a few hours in the library, so sleep was never too far away from me.

Those heady days are reminiscences of my undergraduate work, and it struck me as if all of a sudden that my graduate days were pretty similar. I was working a part-time overnight job in Manhattan (a labor intensive affair that actually caused me to lose thirty pounds), while being a full-time Master’s student in Queens, and juggling all of that with a girlfriend. There was always travel, work, reading, studying, writing, late nights, and at this point I was starting my guitar studies as well.

All of which brings me to Korea. The place that I find myself now (which is to say South Korea) has been very good to me. If you have ever had any desire whatsoever to teach English as a second language, Korea comes highly recommended. Korea can be everything you want it to be, whatever you want it to be, and everything you don’t want it to be. It’s that last one that you have to watch out for, but what will happen in that case is a personal growth and development that is beyond comprehension—you will be different. At any rate, Korea has been very good to me.

Last year, I was in almost complete hermitage. I was in the process of writing a book, and it took up most of my year; however, in order to cull enough fodder for the book from the year, I had to go out and do interesting things (climbing mountains, mudfests, wandering into unknown cities, trying all sorts of new food, and generally finding myself in the most out-of-the-way places that a foreigner could find him or herself), and this took up a lot of time. Beyond that, I was furiously reading and developing my understanding of myself and human beings: from Buddhist readings to philosophy to history to novels to classics and everything in between. Finally, there was a load of guitar practice that happened every week.

I’m not sure who else on the planet is stuck in the mode of being a perpetual student, but I find that my days are happiest when I spend them studying for most of the day, working hard, and playing hard whenever I get a chance. My days are like a personal university that I am putting myself through, and there is even a kind of schedule and what you could call classes.

Music A: The learning and memorization of works of music by other artists.
Music B: The creation of original music.
Literature: The examination of a work of classic literature (right now it’s “The Story of
My Life” by Giacomo Casanova).
Philosophy: David Hume’s “A Treatise of Human Nature”
Creative Writing: Currently working on a short story to be submitted to a journal and poetry is a consistent activity
Languages: I study Korean three times a week in an attempt to see how the acquisition of a second language affects the way a person thinks

The more I consider it, the more I feel like I’m in training, but it’s for something that I’m not sure will ever happen. The other day I read: “You bank on your pursuits to give you happiness, thus confusing means with ends.” Banking on pursuits will bring you only sadness, while pursuing will see you only consistently advancing. It’s difficult because we don’t know what we’re really striving for—the future being as unknowable as it is—but we know we’re working towards something. I feel like this needs a little bit of a further explication, and what I mean is that there is now way to say exactly how our goals will manifest themselves. Let’s say your goal is simply to be the CEO of a business. If that’s your only goal, you might wake up and find one day that you have achieved your goal: you are the CEO of a business dedicated to midget porn. Your goal, technically, has been achieved. You worked toward achieving it, and you did, but you couldn’t have known at the outset (unless you had said to yourself “I want to be the CEO of a business that is dedicated to midget porn”) what the manifestation of it would be.

I have always wanted to be a traveler, and I have traveled a lot. The vagueness of the goal hasopened up avenues and vistas that I had never thought possible, but it also manages to surprise me on a daily basis, and there is something to be said for stability. Everybody, on every day of their life, is training to be the person they will become. What you are doing consistently, every day, is determining the kind of person that you are going to become in the future. You will not decide to be a champion bike rider on Monday and win the Tour de France the next Friday. It is the same in existence. What kind of existence do you want to have? What are you doing today to develop the kind of person that you want to be in the future? Look at what you’re doing regularly, and understand that this is probably what you’re going to do until you make a radical decision to change your training regimen. It’s as easy as recognition, but you have to really see, and remember that slow is the way of nature.