It’s Matthew Wayne Selznick! In Concert!
On Sunday, January 25 at 3:00 PM Pacific time, I’ll perform in a live virtual house concert (my house) which will stream on video through uStream.
Admission is free, but I will have a little tip jar set up. Everyone who donates $20.00 or more the day of the event will get high-quality MP3 versions of every original song I play during the show — at least a dozen live songs!
Interested? Check out his original post for details.
As I said in a previous essay, I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves. Along with that, I’ve been considering the way we see other people’s stories. How we watch then, listen to them, and if they have something we feel we need, how we try to adapt their stories to fit into our own.
This is a useful exercise. When we see a person’s life through the lens of history, such as a personal hero from the past, we do not see all their failings, all their personal struggles. We see an idealized version of them, and we take the qualities of their life that we seek to emulate and attempt to graft them on to our own psyches. We learn and grow this way, trying on stories as we would garments, and when they do not suit us, casting them off.
These days, we live in an information-rich climate. The stories surrounding us, bombarding us at times, all seem to carry something that we’d like to make part of ourselves. I’ve found this to be especially true with the people I’ve met through my work in the podcasting community, where tales of individual drive, perseverance, and passion have turned normally shy people into the writers, musicians, and broadcasters we know and love. There’s much that’s worthy of being emulated there.
There are times that we select beliefs or qualities that make sense to us, only to have them cause dissonance with other, more deeply-rooted attitudes. In my life, that’s been Skepticism vs. Spirituality.
To explain: I know a number of atheists and skeptics. I’ve had a number of discussions with them, and to a great degree, their arguments make a great deal of logical sense to me. My own belief in a God (capital G) has been wavering for years now, and as I make my professional life in a world of logic, the arguments put forward by my skpetic friends are appealing to me. Facts make sense, and believing in things you cannot prove makes none.
However, on a deeper level, my inner life has always been one of mysticism, symbol, and faith. I was raised Catholic, and when I hit the point in my life when I wanted to break out of the Church, I gravitated toward other mystical beliefs: neopaganism and the occult being a major part of that. In retrospect, I can see that I moving from one ritual-based practice to another because it was the motion and poetry of the rituals that I fell in love with, not the actual theology.
In the past three years, these two systems have been causing me some serious internal dissonance. In trying to find a way to make these things work together, I’ve worked myself into a cycle of doubt that has been crippling. One side, the logical side, tells me that all my beliefs that I cannot prove with facts are bollocks, and the other side reminds me that humans work on a deeper level than mere logic, and that Significance is not fact-based, but instinctual and symbolic. It’s a battle that is deeply troubling.
The effect of all of this is that, when I take the skeptical path, I tend to be bitter and angry, and when I take the spiritual, I’m insecure and full of doubt. I do not like the way my life tastes when I am purely skeptical, but I worry that I will float away into a never-neverland if the spiritual should take over.
I do not know where the balance point in my own life lies, but I’m reasonably certain that I’m not the only person fighting this internal fight. If you are one of those people with this same inner turmoil, how do you balance it? What beliefs have influenced you, shown you where your strength lies, and how did you come to your decision?
Your assignment: to find the following items on the Internets and post the links in a comment.
And….go!
Every wonder about how you affect your friends in online networks, or how you are impacted by them? Check out this article from Edge:
Edge: SOCIAL NETWORKS AND HAPPINESS By By Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler
We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.
Younger daughter: “I spy something black.”
Elder daughter: “My life.”
Smell that? You know what it is. It’s that New Year Smell. Go on, stick your head outside and take it in. Drink deeply of the untapped potential and just envision all the wonderfulness this new year might bring.
Yes. I’m serious. Potential. Sure, it exists most of the year, but there’s something about starting “fresh” that inspired most of us to get our shit together, screw our courage to the sticking place, and solider on into the new year with a heart full of hope.
Naysayers, begone! Yes, yes…we all know the success rate on New Year’s Resolutions, but just sit down and shut up. The New Year is about Hope, not about cynicism. In fact, I’d encourage everyone reading this to drop the cynical attitude this year. Imagine what could be accomplished if our inner critics were instantly silenced. Kill the running inner monologue for a while and just live in the moment. I bet you’ll smile more.
Deep breath, folks. It’s a new game out there. I’ll see you on the field.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves.
Each of is the sum total of the stories we’ve been told, that we’ve lived, and that we’ve told ourselves. Some use these stories to grow, some use them to hide, some just use them to fool themselves.
I’ve been witness to some very different stories since moving out here. I’ve met some very rich men, some very poor struggling artists, and some people who are just skating along on the thin ice of this failing economy. I’ve seen a great number of people who seem to espouse the “fake it until you make it” mentality. Bigger, better, faster, more…people are being driven by the basest instincts and the most primal of urges.
I’ve seen all of the Seven Deadly Sins in various forms. Babylon isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind.
We’re all told morality tales when we are going up. Fairy tales, Aesop’s fables, religious stories meant to show the path to a lasting happiness. We’re shown, over and over again, that virtues are to be treasured, and that the easy way is generally bound to fail. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to Dark Side.
It’s only taken me sixteen weeks to realize the truth of all of these tales. I’ve met a great number of people with their angles. They are like caricatures. They really seem to think that they can cheat their way to the top, to happiness, to Nirvana. Pride…there is so much unearned Pride here…it’s a disease.
If there’s a problem in the economy, you’d never know it by the sheer number of Jaguars and BMWs driving around my apartment complex. This is the illusion of success, leased cars when you cannot afford to get your kids new winter coats. I’m not making this up. This actually happens out there.
I’m not sure what stories these people are telling themselves. Maybe these are stories of entitlement…they deserves the big cars, the new iPods, the Next Big Shiny because of how hard their lives are. There’s always a justification, always the safety hatch of rationalization.
Illusion. Kool-Aid. They actually BELIEVE these things.
Now, I was raised differently. My parents may not realize that I was actually listening, but I was. I find myself falling back to the stories that I grew up with. Compassion, honor, humility, common sense. I was not raised to feel that I was entitled to any of the toys these people revel in. I was raised to know that I had to work for things, and nothing worthwhile comes easily.
There is a place in our hearts for Virtue, and I rely on it every day to guide my interactions. The more I rely on Virtue, the more secure I feel in my decisions. I know that I’m operating from a place of sense, not from ego or id. I lean on these old stories, the ones close to my heart, because I believe that we should expect more from ourselves than Enlightened Self-Interest.
If you can take anything away from this rant, it would be this: Believe in the old stories, the ones that appeal to the Better Angels of our Nature. Business these days is a trap, the banking crisis has taught us that. If there is evil in the world, that’s where you’ll find it, amongst the people who can justify any action, any injustice because “it’s just business.” Cling to Honor, Honestly, Justice, Compassion, Valor, Humility.
These things are True. Don’t fall prey to Illusion in the New Year.
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Change, change, change: Sandman and the ’90s « Grand Hotel Abyss
Sandman asks this ethical and political question: Is it better to accept that the world is the way it is and its constant awful tumult will never change, and thus either do your work to the best of your ability or drop out and do your own thing on the fringes; or should you refuse to accept the reality principle and hew to ethical absolutes with the purpose of making the world better than it is? Other options besides these are presented, of course, including the enactment of absolute evil (The Corinthian), the self-enslavement to addictive forms of fantasy (Barbie, Rachel), etc., but the two choices above seem to be the two ethical foci around which the ellipse of the text turns.
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