How To Be Happy.

Dear Future Tim,

I know your mental history, and I love you, so I am now making a list of things that will make you happy.  Right now I have been doing all these things and have been feeling awesome, so I hope they help you if you need help wherever you're at right now.

1)  Stop napping.  For anyone else, naps might be fine or even good.  However, you enjoy them way too much and use them as a way to escape from the world.  You cannot escape.  Stay here.  BE here.  Don't let drowsiness or any other temptation take you away from where you really are.

2)  Do homework when there is still daylight outside.  You are naturally most idle when the sun is up, so this is the best time for you to affirm life and go against the sloth within you and do actual work.  Plus, once you've gotten all your work out of the way, you'll have a free night to do whatever, including think.  You always do your best thinking on a stress-free night, and often have valuable existentially-enriching moments when relaxing at the end of a day.

3)  Switch up the music you listen to.  Listen to whatever you want during the day.  You seem to enjoy more upbeat/hardcore music when the sun is up.  This is good.  Allow the energy in that music to flow through your body and use it to motivate positive and productive action.  When the sun is down, however, tone it down a bit.  Listen to bands like Sigur Ros.  Focus on relaxing before you go to bed.

4)  Eat regular meals.  Eat at least two meals a day, on a schedule.  Ramen doesn't count.  If necessary, force yourself to go out to get food.  Do not eat late at night.  Allow a lengthy digestive period to take place before going to bed.  Try to eat healthy, well-rounded meals.  Chicken is ok.  Eat salad and other veggies.  Cut down on fried potatoes.  Make sure your plate is colorful before you sit down to eat.

5)  Keep substances out of your life.  Affirm life by controlling it.  Those happy feelings you get from the bottle are meaningless.  It's just another cop out.  It's just another type of nap, except physically poisonous.  Remember what you are doing before you take a drink.  Control your body.

6)  Don't freak out.  If you find yourself having any kind of anxiety attack, don't go crazy.  Step back, mentally, and wait it out.  It is a physiological phenomena, and you can still retain a calm mind if you don't let it affect your brain.  Remember that you are more than your body.  You are also a mind.  Identify with your mind if your body is behaving badly, it will stop soon enough.

7)  Be social.  If you are alone on the weekend, go out of your comfort zone to find people to hang out with.  Never spend a whole weekend trapped in your room.  Even if it is just a simple trip to the bookstore, get out.  You are a social animal, Timothy, no matter how much you think you aren't.  You need to see people in order to be happy.  So do it.

8)  Remain active.  Do your homework proactively.  Go to all your classes, always.  Fight the urge to nap.  Read a book.  Do anything except browse Facebook.

9)  Be responsible.  If you need help on something, get it.  If you want something, make sure you do everything necessary to get it.  Don't just give up.  Don't resort to napping.  Affirm life, goshdammit.  You have so much potential, so much to share, so much to experience.  Don't let your own tendency for inaction ruin that all.

10)  Get ready for bed.  Shower, brush your teeth, perhaps do a short workout.  Make sure that you have a distinct separation between before bed time and after bed time.  You don't have to go to bed directly after getting ready, but be sure not to start any really important thing, such as homework, after you've put your pj's on.

11)  Read every day.  If nothing else, read before you go to sleep.  In fact, always read before you go to sleep.  It will leave you will a nice, productive feeling and calm your mind.  Keep up with your determination to be continuously studying.  It doesn't matter if it's literature, philosophy, or economics.  READ.

12)  Have a place for yourself.  This is both physical and mental.  Ideally, try to have your own room.  You are happiest when you have a room to return to in which you know you will not be disturbed.  Keep active and social during the day, but return to your Fortress of Solitude in the evening and retire in peace.  If you are sharing a room, this is difficult, but you can at least create a mental niche for yourself.  Just tell whoever you live with that, before bed, you'd like to be left alone and have little to no conversation.  Pop in your headphones, turn on some Sigur Ros, and you'll be good.

13)  Keep your room clean.  You may not think this is important, but I'm telling ya, it is.  Look around you right now, and if you think any part of it looks like a "mess," fix it.  You will feel so much better and more clear minded.  Trust me on this.

14)  Lastly, and most importantly, be IN CONTROL.  Don't allow yourself to be swallowed up in the current of life.  Don't give up.  Go with the flow, but make sure you are above it all, and that you are in no danger of sinking.  Everything I've mentioned up to this point is derived from this one principle.  Please, be awesome.

There you have it.  It's as comprehensive a list as I can think of right now.  Remember Future Tim, I love you, and I want the best for you.  I want you to be successful.  I want you to be the best person you can.  Most importantly, I want you to be happy.  I want you to be able to notice the sunshine coming in from your bedroom window, and I want you to realize that that light is a manifestation of God's love itself.  That everything around you is beautiful.  That you yourself are beautiful.  You may think your mind is screwed up, but remember how at peace you felt while writing this letter.  Remember the tears that welled up in your eyes as you typed, and the love you felt for yourself at that very moment in time.  Life is good.  You are good.  Don't give up.  I believe in you.

Love,
Me

Peace.

The absence of struggle.  Alone, but not lonely.

Today, I walked across campus to the Leifson Physics building to turn in my lab report.  I hadn't eaten anything all day, and I was a tad hungry, so I went to the Ansari Business building and bought a veggie burrito, a cheese quesadilla, and a Tazo Organic Iced Green Tea (with spearmint and lemongrass).  I saw that the area outside the small Mexican restaurant I had bought my food items was empty, so I decided to sit there and eat my food.  I was alone.

At this point in a blog post, I usually go off on how horrible it is to be alone and everything turns melodramatic.  That isn't going to happen this time.

So anyway, I was alone.  I could hear faint noises coming from the kitchen from whence my delicious meal was just produced, but other than that and the occasional person passing on their way to or from class, it was just me and my food.  It was peaceful, you could say.

Sitting there, I realized something.  Rather, I un-realized everything.  Everything became a wonderful illusion around me.  I was there, yet not there at all.  I experienced a moment of Zen, if you will.  I had forgotten how beautiful I am, alone.  Alone, I have no one to please--no need to do or say or act any certain way.  I can be myself, which is in reality (or non-reality) the absence of self, and enjoy a burrito without anxiety.  I can let go of everything I've struggled so hard to obtain and keep hold of.  My identity as an individual becomes irrelevant, and I can let go.  It feels so good to let go.

We, as egoists, are terribly terrified of letting go.  We have this silly need to BE something, to create an identity for ourselves--to be a unique personality in a uniformly blank sea of faces.  This is what makes us human, I guess.  Our uniquely human social/existential anxiety pushes us to do uniquely human things.  It is doubtful that any other animal species on earth shares these same anxieties--at least not to the degree that we experience them.

They (the animals) are born free.  We (the humans) are born in captivity.  We need people, leaders, to show us the way to freedom.  So we create Moses and Christs and Muhammeds and Buddhas to tell us how to be free.  Unfortunately, many people simply trade their shackles of wild anxiety for chains more tame, more manageable.  Instead of following the examples set forth by the God-men, they set them up as objects of worship--as masters to serve--and grovel at shrines of their own slavery, built by their own misguided hopes and dreams.  They forget the Divine within themselves, and instead glorify false idols.  Surely, we need these God-men to show us that there is a way out--that our earthly prisons are not inescapable and our anxieties not permanent--but that's all they should be used for: to show us that THERE IS a way, not to show us THE way.  We must find the way ourselves, and when we find our own way, we will finally be Free.  We will be Home.

In the words of sometime-philosopher, sometime-madman, Friedrich Nietzsche:

"You have your way.  I have my way.  As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."

There are infinite paths here in life.  We are constantly hopping from one to another, and always we hope for the best.  Today, I found myself on my own uniquely correct path for a while.  I found myself at Home.  I can't stay here forever, I know, but that's alright.  I'll struggle again, worry again, and go crazy again, but that's alright.  We live, we eat burritos, and we die.  And it's all alright.

purpose.

don't be a nihilist
you'll bleed yourself out
like a chicken without a head
running round in circles
frantically chasing its own death.

always have purpose
never be alone.

My Life.

God.

Real talk.

I used to believe in God.  I used to be a Mormon.  The two most important things in my life were God and the Church.  I was sincere and tried my best to be a moral person.  I prayed every night and sometimes cried because I would feel overwhelmed by God's love.  I wanted to share that love with everyone in the world.  I wanted to be His servant.  Jesus Christ was my Savior.  He was my hero and I was so grateful for his sacrifice and his eternal love for everyone, no matter what their place in life.  I wanted nothing more than to be able to die happily, knowing I had done my best to serve God, and then fall on my knees before Christ and thank him from the bottom of my heart for everything he had done for me and mankind.  I believed everyone would one day live happily together in the afterlife and all would be well, for God had a plan for all of us.

I wanted so much for God to be real, and He was real.

I don't believe in Him anymore.  I lost my faith in the Mormon church first.  It was hard.  I had put so much of my hopes and dreams into this organization that it killed a big part of me to leave it.  But I had no choice.  I couldn't accept its "truth" any longer.  I could accept its fundamental message of God's "plan of happiness," the Atonement of Christ, and the concept of an eternal family and the evolution of the soul, but I could not accept its more mundane doctrines.  I couldn't accept the acts of YHWH as behavior consistent with the god I believed in.  I couldn't accept that the kind, loving god I knew would demand genocide and the sacrifice of innocent animals.  I also couldn't accept some of the words of former prophets of the church, such as Brigham Young, and the modern church's stance on gay marriage.  I saw what Christ taught and followed that as best as I could, but discovered that what the church taught and what he taught were not the same.  So I left.

The next step was to lose faith in Christ himself.  I realized, after learning more and more about world religion and the origins of Christianity, that it is extremely unlikely that Christ was who the Christians claim he is.  I began to look at him more and more as simply an Enlightened man, similar to the Buddha, who saw the world in a different way than most of his contemporaries and wanted to share that unique view.  I believe I share that view of his, even now.  Even though I don't believe him to be divine, I definitely think he was right.

The loss of faith in an anthropomorphic God happened simultaneously to the loss of faith in Christ.  I essentially just "gave up" and stopped believing in Him.  There was no real reason for me to keep my faith in God, other than my own human weaknesses, so I gave Him up.  And that's that.

Now I believe in nothing.  I don't have any significant faith to speak of.  I don't know if there's a higher power, and I don't know if there's an afterlife.  And that's that.

My friend has a poster on his wall that says something along the lines of, "Inside every person, there is a God shaped hole."  This is true in a lot of ways, at least for me.  I still want there to be a God, trust me--I do.  I miss Him a lot.  It's almost pathetic.  A life with God is so much simpler.  Whenever things go wrong, you can just rely on God to take care of you.  You can leave the cares of the world behind because you are "in Christ."  All the existential problems are already solved for you.  You can smile at things and think, "God created that.  It is perfect."

Without God, there is none of that obvious perfection.  Things go wrong, and it's not part of some "divine plan."  It is just reality.  There is no safe-haven.  You have to take responsibility for your actions.  You can't just do the best you can and "leave the rest up to God."  Life is so much more brutal when you're all alone.

So here I am, empty inside with a God-shaped hole in my center.  I can't fill it because I am, unfortunately, a brutally honest person.  I can't deny my doubts.  I have partaken of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and I can never go back to the Garden.

I can never go back to God.

Blogs.

Recently, my best friend in the whole world started a blog.  We are so close that we often joke that we are "the same person."  Honestly, I see a lot of myself in his posts, and I'm sure he sees some of his own personality traits and mental problems reflected in my words posted here.

He seems really happy with his blog, and has posted 4 posts already, all pretty cynical and frustrated  stream-of-consciousness type pieces, similar to what I often post here.  I've really enjoyed reading those posts and feel a new connection to my friend that can only be felt through the pretentious shared maintenance of online blogs.  Justin, we really are the same person.

Another good friend of mine also keeps an online blog.  He's much, much different from Justin and me.  He still has sincerity in his heart and is still completely vulnerable to the injustices of the world.  Reading his blog softens my heart and brings the occasional tear to my eye as I observe a beautifully idealistic soul struggling to cope with an ugly and totally absurd world.

He makes me long for a past time in my life where I shared the same, or at least similar, purity of heart, and truly only willed one thing: the love of God.  That phase has long passed, and I've lost that fire of sincerity that once burned brightly in my eyes and in my heart.  I am a broken man.  When I look in the mirror, I see the pain and the emptiness of it all, and I have to look away lest I become trapped inside.  I cover it all up by "going hard" and listening to exciting music, writing angry blog posts, and building up my self-confidence by creating my own illusory world that I can retreat to whenever the the one around me proves itself to be too hard and too unforgiving--in other words, when it acts exactly as I know it will.

I live day by day now.  I no longer have an "eternal perspective"--that ended with my belief in God.  (Here's a word of advice for all you believers out there: keep the faith.  It's damn hard to live with nothing.)  I barely live for the future now, finding its uncertainties and potential failures frightening, and instead focus on the present, trying to make the most of what I have.  Because there's nothing else.

I'm not depressed or anything like that.  How can I be?  All hope has been obliterated from my life, but with the disappearance of hope also comes the disappearance of true fear.  My anxieties can all be ignored now, because I can always find comfort in the nihilistic philosophy of "it doesn't really matter" and get back to jerking off or playing xbox or any number of totally useful activities that I am so fond of.

Despite all that, I do find true happiness.  I don't find it in the fulfillment of hopes and dreams anymore, but rather in really unexpected ways--like seeing a friend start a blog and the resultant strengthening of our relationship through this shared experience, or having a little bit of faith in humanity restored, albeit temporarily, through the words of another friend's raw, personal rantings.  My life is really, really good, to be honest, and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

I write this blog to help me retain my positivity and constantly restore my love of life.  No matter how dark or brooding a post sounds, I write because I am desperately trying to be positive in my real life.  You can't feel good if you have a ton of shit stuck inside.

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Earlier, I lied.  There is one thing I still have to look forward to--falling in love.

Hopefully it's as good as they say.

Understanding.

Finally I understand.  I understand that crazy thing called 'love.'  Somehow, I can rationally understand the irrationality of this enigmatic topic.  It's deeper than sexuality, but shallower than intellectualism.  There is something more to it than just a purely carnal drive, but it does not quite grasp the heights of logical thinking.  Before now, I was convinced that it had to be one or the other, appetite or reason, but now I'm pretty sure it's in another categorical realm altogether.

I've been in what I thought was love two times in my short life.  The first was a sexual desire, and the second was an intellectual surety.

In the first instance, I was completely enveloped by a lustful urge for physical intimacy--an evolutionarily adapted instinct to procreate.  My relationship with this person was fueled by passionate make-out sessions and other physically intimate acts.  Despite our intense physical attachment,  however, we were aligned neither on the intellectual level nor on the 'third' level, which I will attempt to explain later, and as a result our relationship came to an end and we went our separate ways.

The second instance, and the more recent of the two, arose from a sense of perfect compatibility.  I thought we were perfect for each other.  We had similar life goals, similar values, and got along awesomely.  Interestingly enough, throughout the tenure of my fascination with this individual, I did not entertain a single sexual fantasy in which that person was involved.  I called my love 'spiritual' and thought it was everything 'beautiful and lofty,' but sadly, or maybe fortunately, things did not work out and I never even got a date.  The reasons this person gave me for refusing my advances were incomprehensible to me at the time, as there was no logical or sexual reason for the refusal, and instead was just a simple, baffling 'uncertainty.'

This 'uncertainty' has been a terrifying subject for my analytic brain to think about, and I have spent many hours since the rejection trying to understand it.  It is the very reason I am writing this blog post right now and, admittedly, has biased every bit of information I have written here.  In a way, this post is intended as a closure to the anxieties I have experienced since my rejection, and by categorizing and defining this and that and trying to understand what 'love' is, I am calming my mind and moving on.  It doesn't even matter if anything I've said is true or not--what matters is that I believe it, and I do.  So, what of this abysmal 'uncertainty?'

That's what love is, (man).  It's uncertain.  That's the third level, the level of uncertainty.  It's the level of 'just clicking,' of 'at first sight,' of 'I don't know, there's just something about her...'  It's illogical, non-sexual, and wonderful.  Sure, we may justify our uncertainty using reasons, or enjoy our sexual experiences with our partners, but at the end of the day, those things are irrelevant and separate from the uncertainty principle of love.  Love is a zenful thing.  It's like the Tao--unknowable but through experience.

Ok, this may be crazy, I know, but it's alright.  I believe this because of my most recent experience in the arena of 'love,' in which I developed a 'crush' on a person who, while being incredibly attractive, I feel no sexual urges for, and who, while being a complete joy to be around, I hardly even know.  Add to all this the fact that it is extremely disadvantageous for me to have feelings for this person, and we get something that transcends both sex and logic.

And here I was, thinking humans were merely sexual/intellectual beings... I guess there's some Zen to us after all.