Pre-ponderance - (No. 79)

I need to think.

12:58pm.

I need to think. I am not pondering much of late, and I feel like I skipped over a couple of really important things about myself. I felt good last semester because I spent many days pondering and thinking. Self-reflection and introspection. It is all very necessary. Without it, you really can't make the right decisions.

Today, the train of thought started from lunch, when I stayed a few moments after my meal to people-watch. You could tell a lot about how people unconsciously carry myself. I sat there for the longest time. I sat there for a good couple of minutes. It almost became a meditative state.

I have not been good about listening to my internal dialogue and what it has to say. My other Self has become a stranger once again. I've filled my days with too much business and "things to do" that I've neglected my soul. Yes, I've been praying. I need more than that, though. I need to think and hear what I think and sit with myself and figure out what I really want from it all.

It feels all touchy-feely and nonsensical, but it is so essential.

I thought about how I carry myself, and how it might have changed in the past few days. Perhaps it was after the flurry of transfer applications.

After lunch, I stopped by DASIL and asked them a couple of questions. I talked with Cole, and he really allayed my fears about the interview. It's a relaxed process. I will chat about the behavioral, and then there are a couple of worksheets to do, each for a subject.

Random theory about GWSS is just structured time for introspecton. Regardless of everything, people should be more introspective. GWSS takes that to extrema. Random though, because I've just see a class of them walk around outside, sitting outside with notebooks. Ask me how I knew it was them.

He remembered chatting about PCI earlier on in the semester, joining their lunch table and talking with them. "Yeah, I remember you from last semester. You joined our lunch table . That was bold". Dang, that was really me. A reminder of myself from last semester. I was pretty bold.

I wonder how much I'm looking at myself extrinsically. It can't just be that. I disguise it and tell myself that I'm doing this because I like it, because it feels right then, because why not. That answer is okay, it is adequate, but it is not complete. The complete answer requires that you really think about yourself and how things align with your values. I have to increasingly play the long-game. How would you live a life for the rest of it? What is the long-run? There's a quote somewhere, attributed to Bill Gates, about how the thing you'll do (or should do) for the rest of your life, is the thing you did the most during the ages of 12-14. I read. I read and I dreamt of things, laying on my bed. I created stories.

I know that I don't want to be the person who goes through all of the motions, and then regrets it, and then wishes he'd do something different. I think to all of the CS majors who never really liked doing CS in the first place. You are not tech-ing towards your comparative advantage if you never know what your comparative advantage is. If you try to do someone else's specialty, without knowing your own, you will 1) never be as good as the person who does genuinely love it, and 2) never find out what you are good at.

I remember from last semester, a lot of my thoughts were about pinpointing what the essential part of my time at Grinnell was. You don't want to live a life and then, at the end of it, figure out that you've never lived. I used to have a different mindset about things. I felt more independent, agentic. I had life bubbling within me. Now, I worry that if I don't become more conscious of the surroundings and what I'm doing, I would succumb to the motions of life, and not actually live.

Last semester, I was thinking about "learning for the long-run". Then, I really only meant the next few semesters, or weeks. Learning for the long-run and setting up values that last for the rest of your life. Values change, of course, but introspection is required to understand what the long-run looks like for you.

This is what I meant by extrinsic. Ostensibly, all of these activities "look good" on resumes. They sound grandiose. Their names have weight, and you feel like you can leech of their credibility-- instead of needing to build your own. You can cover your own anxiety, insecurity, and deficiencies in a pool of verbose and official-sounding titles. That is no way to live. If I removed all of my titles and positions and histories of "experience", what do I actually know, or actually want to know? I thought to myself, because of my time in community college, well, I'll actually be that person who has 6-years of experience after graduating from college. What would that even be for, though? I soon realized that it was a shallow thought, a useless and meaningless thought.

There is also another thought that I have to address, and quash. It is of hoping that I do a lot of things, and then

In a way, a twisted, long-winded, almost-perverse way, it is still a form of trying to seek approval and validation. That is not authentic, if you live like such. Authenticity does not work like that. You cannot... pretend to be authentic, David.

David, also take a moment right now. Who are you writing to? Are you writing to yourself, or are you writing for the blog again? Do you want others to find this blog, and then think to their selves, oh wow, this dude was kinda cool, kinda good? That is not how you want to live. In other words, are you trying to cultivate a persona of authenticity, just for others to see? In doing so, you shatter the very thing you purport to create.

Alex's statement from earlier this month is wrong too as well. "I need to make a portfolio such that anyone who sees it thinks damn, that was good". I remember not being able to point out what didn't sit right with me when I heard it then. As an artist, you don't want to make a portfolio that impresses others. You can't. You just want to capture the world as you see it, capture your own view. The artist then serves something higher. In some way, that's people call it a tortured profession. You serve the Muse. Writers serve the Muse. This Muse, I'd like to think of divine intervention. Sometimes it really is divine intervention that draws out the words in your essay, or the brushstrokes on your canvas.