Spring is upon us, and oh, how the mind flourishes this time of year, with all those treebuds opening, flowers blooming, people out and about with fewer clothes on, and longer, warmer days lighting our way to another endless summer! Moods are brighter, my friends! Smiles abound. A long, shitty winter of my discontent is behind me, and better days lie ahead.
So I have some thoughts.
1. Between our addiction to dopamine and the way our unconscious minds work, I’ve reached the conclusion that most, if not all, human behavior is pre-determined. Not by ‘God’ or some invisible power, but by ourselves. I’m convinced that our unconscious beliefs and biases, coupled with our perpetual search for dopamine, have turned us all into psychological prisoners. Some of us more than others. If this is true, can we really say that free will exists? If every decision we make is dictated by a hidden need for a chemical pleasure release, or an unconscious bias, expectation, or belief that’s cemented in concrete, aren’t our options in any given situation limited by that mental jail we’ve put ourselves in? Limited choice, even if self-induced, isn’t free will, is it? It’s just a mouse running back to the sugar water nozzle 1000 times and refusing to explore the maze to find the cheese because that sugar water is RIGHT THERE and tastes really fucking good! Until it runs out.
2. I’ve had Eckhart Tolle’s book ‘The Power of Now’ collecting dust on my bookshelf for years. Don’t remember where I bought it. Someone may even have gifted it to me. Anyway, I finally cracked it open a few weeks ago, and it tapped into something that’s bothered me for a long time: how can I learn to be present and exist in the moment in life? How can I stop my mind from puking out thoughts every second of every day? TPON’s core premise is that we live perpetually in the past or the future, not the present, so we go through life as robots, not really living, just reacting and being distracted by things that we can’t control, things that have happened already but we wish we could change, and things that we hope will happen or are afraid will happen in the future. Our social media age has made this problem much worse. Our cell phones are handy dandy dopamine dispensaries that intensify the distraction factor any time we want. They take us away from important people and moments in our lives just so we can get a much-needed dopamine hit for a few minutes or a few hours. It’s a mediocre, half-assed way to live, like watching life through a pair of virtual reality goggles instead of EXPERIENCING it. But it’s how we all live. It’s how we choose to live.
According to TPON, to find happiness and experience life at an optimal level and in its highest form, we need to learn to be present by learning how to just BE. Being present in the here and now, existing in the present moment, is the only meaningful way to experience this life. The rest is in our heads and totally meaningless. The past has already occurred and can’t be changed, no matter how much we obsess about it. The future hasn’t happened yet and may never happen in the way we imagine it. Most of our thought loops about the past and the future are based on fear. We can break out of this by learning to be present and view our thoughts non-judgmentally and from a distance as they come in, and redirect ourselves to the present moment.
This is way easier said than done, but I’m determined to learn how to do it through mindfulness and meditation. Even in the amateurish way I’ve approached both so far, based on my limited knowledge of how they’re done, I’ve noticed a difference in my mindset and patience level. I plan to make both of these pursuits a bigger part of my life for the rest of my life.
3. Speaking of that long, shitty winter of my discontent, one of the things that helped me get through it was music. Lots of music. The song I played the most, by far, was ‘Titanium’ by Sia. I’m such a big fan of hers, and the words in this song are so affirming and empowering, with Fuck You, Phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes lyrics and a David Guetta pounding backbeat which, combined, raise a middle finger to the person/circumstances that crushed your spirit and blast their sorry asses into outer space:
Cut me down, but it’s you
Who’ll have further to fall
Ghost town and haunted love
Raise your voice, sticks and
Stones may break my bones
I’m talking loud, not saying much
I’m bulletproof, nothing to lose
Fire away, fire away
Ricochet, you take your aim
Fire away, fire away
You shoot me down, but I won’t fall
I am titanium
You shoot me down, but I won’t fall
I am titanium
I made it my anthem for months. Played it full blast whenever I got down. In the shower, in the car, in the kitchen, at work. Closed my eyes, inhaled the words, and felt them in my bones. Fucking love this song.
4. I’ve been watching kids in Gaza get slaughtered by Israel for the past 7 months. The most horrific scenes of carnage. Dead babies, bloodied children my daughter’s age, kids with faces turned blue from suffocation, a wailing father carrying dead twin toddlers in each arm, his mind destroyed by grief, a 2 year old-girl seizing from PTSD, kids with missing limbs from amputations without anesthesia, kids pulled alive and dead from rubble that used to be buildings before Israeli jets dropped bombs on them. I can’t believe it’s happening in this day and age, and there have been times when I’ve had to take breaks from these images so I don’t get totally depressed. The world not only is letting this happen, it’s encouraging and supporting this mass murder. Specifically, my country, the United States–the supposed paragon of human rights–is supplying the money and bombs that have caused this carnage. I’ve never been more ashamed to be an American, and the slanted, insanely biased, one-sided, pro-Israel way our media has portrayed this conflict disgusts me. The past 7 months have changed my views of Israel and the United States forever. I’ll never forget this. I’m not pro-Hamas, but I’m fully on the side of Palestinians in this conflict, and I support the American students who are protesting Israel’s ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and war crimes, which some people, including myself, believe is a genocide.
5. I read this on TikTok the other day:
Infatuation is when you find somebody who is absolutely perfect.
Love is when you realize that they aren’t, and it doesn’t matter.
Sums things up quite nicely, doesn’t it? There are people who live in the first scenario, always wanting to replicate the original ketamine hit, the highest of the highs, which can never be duplicated with the same person again. I’m looking for the second scenario. The second one’s real. The second one lasts. But it’s way harder to find, and too many people think they want it but really don’t.
6. I don’t think compatibility and relationship success are driven by the extrovert versus introvert dynamic. That’s way too simplistic and subjective for my taste. Most of us lean one way but have elements of both, hence the terms ‘ambivert,’ ‘omnivert,’ and ‘extroverted introvert’, which I’ve seen everywhere on dating apps lately. Also, introvert-leaners like me prefer extrovert-leaners for a host of reasons. I don’t do well with full-time introverts. Like isn’t always compatible with like. Personally, I prefer the contrast and ‘personality pull’ of an extrovert to give me the opposite of what I am and help me grow as a person (and vice-versa).
No, to me, compatibility and relationship success have far more to do with attachment style. And specifically in my case, learning my own attachment style triggers and doing everything I can to avoid Avoidants from now on. Gotta drill down on those parental relationships, people, especially the maternal ones. They’re literally a roadmap.
7. A few weeks ago, Ex. and I took M. to see her favorite singer, Olivia Rodrigo, at Madison Square Garden. Ex. and I rarely do things together with M., but this was her first concert, so we wanted to share the experience with her. There was a surreal aspect to the three of us going into the city together for the first time in years. We were a ‘family’ but not a family. There isn’t a word for this arrangement, but it occurred to me throughout the evening how all relationships have chapters to them. As the dynamic between two people changes over time, a new chapter gets written, and no one knows in real time how many chapters are in the book or how the book will end. Due to circumstances not of one’s own making, some relationship books end up being shorter than we want them to be, while others end up being way longer than we want them to be. It’s an open question whether the book is pre-written, or we write it ourselves. In any case, Ex. and I have a new chapter now, a far more amicable and peaceful chapter than we had during virtually our entire relationship, even when we were dating. It’s weird but nice.
Anyway, my point here is not about Ex., but M. She was happy to have us together for a night, holding both of our hands as we walked down 7th Avenue to get to MSG. I thought to myself how hard all of this must have been for her, the division, the separation, the two homes, the splitting of her love between two parents who live in two different places and are rarely together. I take so much of that for granted, what she has to deal with every day and how gracefully she handles it, never complaining, never seeming to be down when a part of her must still secretly want a family with her two parents in one place again. It made me sad.
On a happier note, I’m glad Ex. and I were able to create this night for M., because it ended up being one of my top 5 special experiences as a father. M. absolutely LOVES music, and it’s not an overstatement to say that this concert was life-changing for her. It was so amazing to see her wide-eyed and happy, surrounded by tweener fans like herself, belting out all the lyrics to Rodrigo’s angst-ridden songs about breakups and jealousy and experiencing the world as a young woman at the top of her lungs because she knew all the words by heart. Dancing, waving her arms, and rocking back and forth just like I do at a U2, Springsteen, or Pearl Jam concert. It was fucking incredible and also bittersweet, because it felt like we were fast-forwarding a movie of her life, and I was standing next to her as a 16 year-old. That day is coming much faster than I can comprehend.
And Ms. Rodrigo is already quite a performer at a very young age. That’s her on the floating moon:
We didn’t get home until after midnight, and M. was still floating from the experience.
Right before she went to bed, she had this huge, incredulous smile on her face and said ‘That was so amazing, I can’t even believe it. It was so magical. I’m never going to feel like that again.‘ I responded ‘It was magical, but yes you are going to feel that again, sweetheart. You’re going to have a lot more experiences like this. Maybe not exactly like this, because this was your first concert, so it’s special in that way, but you’re going to go to a lot more concerts and have a lot more feelings like this in your life.’
I feel so blessed to have been able to experience this with her, to have created this special moment for her and then bask in her reaction to it. Before I became a father, I could never have imagined this feeling, or having this kind of relationship with another person. Nothing compares to it. I’m fucking lucky.
8. The line between being deeply in love with someone and never wanting to see them again is way thinner than we think. Scary thin. This isn’t the goal though. Anger isn’t the goal. Apathy is the goal. Apathy takes time.
9. For anyone interested, the following shows I’ve watched recently are eminently binge-worthy: Shameless (Netflix), Fallout (Prime), 3 Body Problem (Netflix), and Baby Reindeer (Netflix).
10. Sure, I may be 5’7″ and middle-aged with a shaved head and white beard–a specific look that not every woman will appreciate–but that dual citizenship application of mine is proving to be quite the marketing tool, and I’m milking the fuck out of it. Turns out more than a few (under 5’6″) women wouldn’t mind living in Italy full-time one day.
[Shoulder shrug emoji]
