Ships at Sea

Listen. "You have nothing to lose." I would say it; I would mean it. But it's not really true. There's always something to lose, something to gain, something at stake. But that's not the point. The point is that you should let go, and anything that you have to tell yourself, anything you must believe or disbelieve in order to finally and fully let go, that's something you've got to do, and it's fine.

What do we hold onto? More than anything else, ourselves. But we're human, and damned stupid. We jealously guard a chest, knowing nothing of its contents. We're so possessive of ourselves - but what are we? Who are you - really? When you start really looking into your constitution, you discover nothing but a bunch of contingencies. "Well I happen to be like this because of this and that." Can that really suffice for self-knowledge? It's too flimsy.

And the most annoying thing of all is finding out that all those things that aren't that great about you, well, those are contingent too. You can do something about them - you can become a better person. Really! But it's such a bitch to do. Your whole life, you're building a ship while lost out in sea. It's really amazing that we have selves at all, except for the fact that most of our selves are so shoddily built. Can you blame us? You work with what you've got, and each of us is hard-wired to keep going, keep building, keep patching leaks and fashioning makeshift sails from soiled underwear. We're wet, we're cold, we're despondent - but we're still going.

So you've got some nice things about yourself on one hand, and some not-so-nice things on the other. You know which is which - you can't help but know. We get plopped down into the ocean of the world and spend years of our lives just trying to survive. Finally a moment of respite comes and we step back to look at what we've built. And what a surprise! Not only is there the ocean and the sailor, but also a ship! At first we're pretty impressed at how the ship all fits together, almost as if it were built on purpose.

But this ship which protects us from the elements is also our prison. The world, and our experiences of it, is filtered through our self. We draw conclusions, make inferences, establish arguments. But our self is our prison. Where are our loyalties? Over and over, we side with ourselves and against the world. What cowardice!

Our flaws are caught up in the web of our self; their excision is not easy, cannot be surgical, and necessarily entails radical transformations in areas previously thought unrelated. And so it doesn't surprise me that few have the courage to undertake a radical restructuring of themselves, and most who begin rebuilding ultimately give up, afterwards discrediting the whole enterprise as futile.

"You have nothing to lose." No, you have everything to lose. I think of it as a game. You put something of yours at stake, in hopes of gaining something better. But the stake of the game is nothing short of the game itself, that is to say, life. Probably, your life isn't going to amount to anything. If you make a lot of money, you'll eventually die and that wealth will mean nothing. If you raise a family, in three generations that family will forget you. Statistically, we're all irrelevant.

So what really matters? What is at stake in life? What is worth striving toward? What victories confer real honor? Each of us will answer this differently. For me, I am possessed by certain unshakeable drives. Honesty. Truth. Virtue. These are the things that are worth something to me, these are the things which make everything worth something. Perhaps it is my ultimate stubbornness, that I should pursue these things alone, at the cost of all else. But ambitious men have always been called stubborn and arrogant by those who could not understand their motives.

So let them sneer and jeer, and judge me odd or dangerous. A good friend of mine said it best. You can dis me - just don't dismiss me.