Very Good Advice #03: Zugzwang
dear bijan,
one of my biggest fears is risking everything and failing. my other biggest fear, maybe the BIGGER fear, is staying comfortable and becoming complacent until i'm too old and settled to even really remember the dreams and opportunities that have passed me by.
Actually, okay, yeah, I'm definitely more scared of staying comfortable...But when you're young and everything is kindof uncomfortable, how do I know what comfortable is and when to actually run from it? How do you walk the line between taking those important risks and just acting like a total idiot?
- Total idiot
i to the illo, h to the -allie
My Dear, Kind Idiot,
You’ve caught me at a good time—well, not a great time, but a good one, or, at least, not a terribly bad one, and isn’t that really what matters? Isn’t living your best life not having your apartment taken over by furry (but, I assure you, relatively harmless) spiders or having your budget, late-model Nissan infested with tens of thousands of bees? I don’t know much, but what I do know is this: I’m just, like, in a really good place right now, so I’ve picked your question out of the wasteland that is my inbox (letterstobij@gmail.com, for those of you keeping score at home), and decided—nay, deigned—to answer your question instead of cleaning the scorched and curiously salted bit of earth that is my apartment.
And O! What a question it is!
It rips into the chest cavity of life and squeezes (then licks) the heart of the contemporary human experience: What are we to do with our lives? Before, when humans lived nearly not at all, the question was moot; now that we hum along under fluorescent lights like worker bees (gorging themselves on that shitty free coffee in the office you hate but drink anyway because it’s free, I guess, and because it’s something to do while you watch time unfurl before you like a $0.55/ft2 beige carpet spiraling out into the deepest, blackest abyss you've ever seen), we've finally got some time to think. What I mean to say is that yes, your fears are reasonable, and perhaps even profound.
I’ll be honest, Idiot; your question immediately reminded me of my least favorite Dostoevsky, The Idiot—a long novel that sort of tangentially deals with this question, as a young, fatally generous, idiot prince loses his mind by not taking a risk and marrying the woman he loves. So there’s a sort of risk-taking in inaction, too. There’s no way out, this is zugzwang, there’s no good move to make but move you must.
If it isn’t too forward, I’d like to ask you a question: What have you ever risked, and when have you ever failed? You don’t have to answer now, but I want you to think about it. Failure has its own sort of beauty, like a fire opal or a particularly clear emerald, and within it there’s the comfort that—if you truly risked something, if you really did the most you could—there’s nothing else to be done. It’s final. And that’s the real risk: self-knowledge. It’s what got Adam and (St)Eve unceremoniously booted from wherever the fuck Eden was.
I also think these fears are related, because complacency is inaction and inaction is the avoidance of risk and that is a decision in and of itself. I worked an office job for a while, and there, at the end of every day, I could feel something of my inner self being depleted, like there was some finite reserve of it and reaching the end would provoke murderous rage or buying a motorcycle or suicide or growing irretrievably old in a suit and tie. Marking time with successively nicer watches. The opposite, if it needs to be said, of living fast, dying young, and leaving a beautiful corpse.
Because I do think your feelings are dependent on youth, Idiot. That’s one of the funny things about life: One way or another, the range of your future choices—what's left to choose—narrows every day as potential is turned into actual, like potential energy transformed to kinetic. Since this isn’t a physics problem set you can’t turn the actualized back into the potential, though. As with failure, your choices are in some real sense final.
However, take heart! It’s not all bleak, and the fears you describe in your first paragraph contain their own solutions. You’re right about being young and uncomfortable; it’s the name of the game, isn’t it? Were you an awkward teenager? I was, and the reason I was awkward—and the corollary to this is of course why the popular kids were popular—was because I had no idea of who I was or what I was doing or what I wanted, and therefore I couldn’t make decisions at all. Or, if I made any, I wouldn’t stick by them. My point, of course, is that I didn’t have enough knowledge about myself—about who I was—to effectively operate in the world. (That’s not to say that I can operate effectively now, but things have gotten a little better.) I couldn’t have confidence because I didn’t have a core.
This here is the heart of the thing, the raw meat your questions tasted. You know as well as I do that there aren’t any hard and fast rules about when to run from complacency. I simply can’t give you any. And if I could, I’d charge you life-coach rates. What you can know, however, is yourself. With that—as you make decisions and take risks and learn who you really are inside, at night, when no one’s awake but the clock’s second hand—you’ll know how complacent is too complacent, and how comfortable is too comfortable amid the vague background radiation of youthful uncomfortable-ness.
I left my office job for a number of reasons, none of which are really relevant now, but I can feel my store of self replenishing. I’m closer to the abyss now than I was before, but I also know more of who I am and what I'm doing, and the carpet here is $1.50/ft2; that’s what living is about, isn’t it? Dearest Idiot, I think you’re neither Myshkin nor (St)Eve. Make a decision. Take a risk. Boot yourself out of Eden. Even if it’s not worth it in the end, you’ll learn what “worth it” means to you. That’s more important than almost anything.
Peace be upon you and your spirit,
bijan