Life comes with consequences. I am reminded daily of the difficulties posed by being alive. I recently watched the movie Garden State for the nth time, and there was a scene that struck me. Natalie Portman is in the bathtub (fully clothed pervs) with Zach Braff talking about figuring out oneself and delving into the emotions that we tend to put aside and pocket instead of dealing with. He says, “God, this hurts so bad” to which she responds, “I know it hurts. That’s life. If nothing else, it’s life. It’s real, and sometimes it fucking hurts, but it's sort of all we have.” We live in a society clouded by things like perfection, competition, and motivation that it is sometimes hard (has been at least for me) to see the beauty in it. I think that the movie does a good job acknowledging that aspect of coming to terms with present situation of things – a defining problem in my own life.
In the New York Times article about the high school senior applying and hearing back from colleges, the story does a good job recounting the social problems of modern society: the desire to be the ideal candidate, and the potential problems with seeking perfection. I feel as though as students vying for the attention from schools, from teachers, from parents, from jobs that we lose any sort of individualism we have striven so hard for. The author of the article says that if we are in fact “free to be everything” than it only follows that we are “expected to be everything”, and in the end the “eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect resume”. I certainly have seen a taste of this in my own life. This year, more than ever, I have felt the need to find out who I am, and through this class have come closer to that answer though so much more is still left to explore. I find it frustrating that I feel much like Esther – in the essay – when she says that she is “on the verge... like I’m just about to enter into adulthood, to reach some kind of state of independence and peacefulness and enlightenment”. It’s that drawn out process that plagues my day with feelings of an unsettled insignificance.
The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Kingston, alludes to this but takes a different approach. The Chinese culture that the narrator is brought up in “demands that the feelings playing about in one’s guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms” (9). This quote is a reference to her father’s sister who committed suicide over being an embarrassment to her family. There is a set of priorities in that society that everyone must follow, and surrender their lives to that does not allow for emotions to run high, or even contest with daily routine. The only way that the narrator is able to explore herself and test the parameters of her own life is by observation of the outside world. Later in the novel, she compares herself to the swordswoman of Chinese stories. In contrast to the character, she says the only “fighting and killing [she had] seen was not glorious”, but she “had to learn about dying if [she] wanted to become a swordswoman” (52). I interpreted this as her own exploration of becoming someone to be revered: the swordswoman. One must encounter and face their problems head on before they are able to surpass them and grow. Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, talks about this in his video on Perfection. He says that as individuals we are retroactive in maturing whenever we put off our feelings of anxiety and fears of not being perfect, and there is something to learn from becoming a more emotionally aware and stable being.
Empty - Ray LaMontagne
Lyrics Here
Society breeds us to strive for being perfect, and I am just as much a victim of doing so. It has been something that I have been trying to free myself from, but for one reason or another find myself frustrated whenever that perfection is not attained. In this case, as Molyneux states it is “excellence interfering with happiness”, and true happiness will come whenever one can set come to terms with just living for ones own sake.
No comments:
Post a Comment