What do you do…

when this is what’s floating around your head?

--The efforts which the mind makes to surmount the obstacle, excite the spirits and enliven the passion.
--People have (with the help of convention) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy, but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult.
--‘Tis impossible that reason and passion can ever oppose each other, or dispute for the government of the will and actions. The moment we perceive the falsehood of any supposition, or the insufficiency of any means our passions yield to our reason without any opposition.
--All those who love know exactly the limit they are prepared to go to. They know exactly what is required.
--To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
--We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
--How keen everyone is to make this world their home, forgetting its impermanence. It’s like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.
--For this reason (love being difficult) young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.
--Morality is not an object of reason… vice and virtue are not matters of fact.
--But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is—solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.
--When the mind pursues any end with passion… by the natural course of the affections, we acquire a concern for the end itself, and are uneasy under any disappointment we meet with in pursuit of it.
--Love… is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
--The pleasure of study consists chiefly in the action of the mind and the exercise of the genius and understanding in the discovery or comprehension of truth. If the importance of the truth be requisite to complete the pleasure, ‘tis not on account of any considerable addition which of itself it brings to our enjoyment, but only because ‘tis in some measure required to fix our attention.

My world consists these days in the maelstrom of love, passion, understanding, human nature, and truth. I’ve thought about it for a bit, and I’m totally fine being thoroughly unable to accurately define any of those terms in a relatively small space. Then, I think about the fact that those things are swirling together, and defining them while attempting to overcome the contiguity they share with other ideas and impressions, the causes and effects of their existence or absence, and the resemblances they have to the constant stream of my impressions, and I wind up in awe at the state of the human character.
I understand why people drink.
I understand why people do drugs.
When you let the mind run free and wild, it overwhelms itself… easily.
Most people learn to curb this complete mental freedom that we all have through their training as children—and you’d better believe that everything that happens to you in school and at home is training. They learn to focus on certain things. They are taught that some things are important while some things aren’t. They are shown what it means to love every day they watch their parents interact. Passion is illustrated through the media, the relations, and the relationships that are seen every day. Understanding is reached whenever I am told it has been reached, whether that’s a test score, a light bulb moment, or a goal being reached. Human nature is constantly being monitored, constantly updated, and it is in our nature to be nurtured while nurturing our nature—that whole argument is stupid… not ignorant: stupid. Truth is the combination of individual theory and practice (and I’m going to leave it there because it would take a lot more space to try to define it), but it is seen and felt periodically enough to not give up on it completely.
Currently, I am teaching English as a second language in South Korea, and I have had the unique opportunity to observe some cultural phenomena that are highlighted by similar phenomena in the USA.
Korean children are taught to abhor failing. This cannot be stressed enough, so I will illustrate it. When I first arrived here, I would give a test or quiz, and fifteen minutes later check up on how things were going. Sometimes, if a Korean child doesn’t know the answer to number 1, they stop, having failed, and will not simply skip it and go to the next one. Any inability that they have is an automatic failure and they get that deer in headlights look we are all so aware of because they know they are in the process of failing.
American children are taught that sometimes it’s okay to fail, which always registers as: failing is fine. We lower our standards so that they’re not failing, but this is a backhanded way to say that failing is acceptable because we can always change the standards by which we’re held. You have only to see the educational standards of the United States stacked up against the rest of the first world—what an awful denomination, and I have no doubt that you will see what I mean.
The problem, as I see it, with both of these systems is that the focus is entirely wrong. In the first place, it teaches students that failure exists. Failure can only be the unachieved goal set for a person by somebody who is not that person. When I set a goal for myself, it’s a want. When somebody else sets it for me, it’s an external expectation. When I don’t achieve somebody else’s goal, I don’t get them what they want. When I don’t achieve my goal, I don’t get what I want. That’s it. I haven’t failed anything.
Doesn’t that sound a lot like: the only failure is not trying?
Yes.
That’s because (with a slight modification): in every genuine attempt involving legitimate effort, progress is always achieved, even if it looks like a regression. Attempt to love, attempt to feel passion, attempt to understand human nature, and attempt truth.