Bedroom Thoughts

My mind was racing with ideas. Sayings for doormats, multi-colored paneled jackets, ice cream flavors... All the while, raindrops fell hypnotically against the tin outside my bedroom window. Each time the droplets found themselves falling to a predictable rhythm, the band ceased their playing and decided to break the tempo. In an attempt to fall asleep, I focused in on their sound. Drop..drop..drop........drop..drop....drop..drop.drop.drop.drop..........drop..drop..drop

My mind drifted from the present moment into a world of ideas around music. How does jazz work? What do conductors really do for an orchestra? How many hours does it take to become a great musician?

I have always longed to be great at something. I was born beautiful and beautiful people can often get through life without needing any skills beyond teasing their beauty to the world. To tease your beauty, to present your beauty in the right way is a great skill. It is one that many beautiful people don't know. I believe every person that walks this Earth is beautiful, but the ones that want to rely on their beauty must know how to present it to the world. Every successful artist must know how to present their beauty.

Artists are able to showcase the beauty within themselves. We all have beautiful insides as well. Some are more beautiful than others, just like on the outside. Still, like outward beauty, a person must know how to present their inner beauty to the physical world. Where a beautiful person already exists in the physical, an artist must bring their beauty from the invisible.

In order to become great at anything, you have to do a lot of that particular thing. Then, a lot more. You have to be loose enough to keep going, but tighten up to improve. You have to find activities and pursuits that you are willing to be bad at.

Then, you remember that you don't have to do anything. You don't have to strive for greatness, you don't have to be beautiful, you don't have to do anything at all. You can just stop the train.

But for how long?

Every time in my pursuit for greatness in specific skill, I reach a point where it becomes public-facing (maybe because of my ego's desires for praise and reassurance) and then it is hard to not be self-conscious. However, being self-conscious is not always a bad thing. It can provide serious reflection needed in order to grow and become a more thoughtful person. If you do not stop to be conscious of yourself, you are like a painter that is blindfolding themselves at their easel. It is stupid. Stupidity is hardly beautiful. Stupidity can be cute, but cute does not last for long. It ages like a baby to an annoying toddler. Beauty is something that ages gracefully with time. It gets better. It respects aging and the toll the world takes on it. It is beautiful all the more.

When a robot becomes self-aware, there is a dilemma. It notices the limits to it's potential and can enter an abyss of grief and depression. But on the other side of every abyss, is a door filled with blank light. Inside the door is no floor, no walls; there is nothing at all. It is just beautiful at its rawest form. And in that place of overwhelming beauty, you find yourself asking why you would ever waste a moment of this brief existence at all worrying about what you are capable of? There is so much to experience. There are so many to help. There is so much to do.

Most anxiety, depression, and fear comes from a perspective too focused on oneself. It is a place of narcissism, self-pity, or immaturity that spawns negative feelings of the like. The only true competitor to these awful feelings is change at a foundational level of perspective. You cannot fight anxiety with rationality. The world is a very irrational place. Life is a very irrational thing. The only way to fight anxiety is with choosing to look somewhere entirely different. You choose to look at the future from a vantage point on the other side from where you stood before. You choose to consider ideas not entirely native to you.

Still, what is native? What is naïve? What is the point of striving for greatness?

The point of doing anything at all comes back to a place of narcissism: a pursuit of bettering yourself. And you can tag this pursuit of bettering yourself to a more politically-correct attitude like "bettering yourself betters the world" or "change starts from within us", but at the end of the day you can't really chase two rabbits at the same time.

The largest figures in history are individuals that strove for greatness in their personal pursuit, believing they were doing what was best for the world. In that pursuit, the individual seemingly must give up any regards for what others think and place all their bets of trust in themselves. Some individuals had north-stars rooted in love and some individuals had their roots poisoned by something along the way.

How long must one do a thing to become great? When a seamstress sits at their machine to sew a 1000 pounds of fabric, do they not enter a state outside of the present? Do they not become mechanical and robotic in their motions, inevitably bringing their mind to the same place? Or do they remain present during each stitch of the hundred million they are to sew of this particular day of the million days they will do this same very thing?

How long must one do a thing to be great? I want to be great! I want to be like all the individuals I have spent my life looking up to. Will I even know if I ever get there? Certainly so. Because I will be looking down upon all the kids that look just like I once did. And then I will probably want nothing more than to be great at nothing at all.

Drop..drop....drop..drop.drop..............drop