There is something in waiting for a loved one who is in an interview. A metallic beauty. An understanding that in one hour your whole life could change immensely, will change at least in some small way.
I have noticed through the years that I increasingly long to save time. What I am trying to save it for, I don't know. Lately I have been blatantly using time up. I have been basking in my ability to get obsessed and involved in things I would usually avoid solely to save the time. It feels good.
I am pursuing interaction with others, again. I am more interested in how wonderful they are than how wonderful or unwonderful they may find me.
All in all, I feel that these past six months have changed me immeasurably. And yet. I am still hesitant to say I am changed. I have been burned too many times by the disappointment of thinking I had transformed when really I have only had a slight fever. This disappointment has left me, in my own small way, bitter. I am cynical even when others seem to think they have changed, and so in my way I am bogging them down with who they used to be. I am trying to move past that right now.
Even though I have changed for the better, it disappoints me that some of my old weaknesses still resurface from time to time. I still hate it when I make mistakes, even small ones. Like misspelling Gibran's name a few posts ago, and not even noticing until last night. It isn't like I didn't read that post a million times. I just get so caught up in what is being said, and I forget the details. This, I have been told in academic circles, makes it difficult to take me seriously. I think that is silly. I, myself, ignore others' misspellings, grammatical errors, and misplaced punctuation. In theory these details don't matter to me.
One of my problems is, I used to evaluate myself almost completely on others' reactions to me. If people liked me, then I was a good person. If people didn't, then I was a bad person. In many ways my growth these past four years has been away from this error. However, I am still growing. I now evaluate myself on two different scales. Primarily I hold myself up to my own well thought through beliefs and theories. I have gained faith that nobody knows me as well as I do, and have come to even be rather fond of myself. But secondarily, it is hard not to take others' reactions into account (and perhaps foolish). The problematic part is to find a balance. A system of evaluation that is neither too relaxed nor too strict. I need to reach the optimum self-improvement ratio. If I am even just a little off, I waste precious time needed to improve my self. I either become unpredictable and dangerous to those around me, or I become stagnant and of no interest. At least, such has been my perception.
It is very important for me to not waste time in the game of self-improvement. Because I have always believed I only have this short time to live, and what matters is that I evolve to the highest possible form I can reach while in it.
Lately, my faith in this has not been shaken, but rather I am allowing that it is too simple a dogma in too complex a world.
I think I also need to slow down and appreciate the world around me. Get out of my head more often. Allow my obsessive mind to obsess about other things than just this. It's just a theory, but I like it. Instead of avoiding all things that might obsess me, I have to be brave and allow myself to get swept up into them. It's scary, but oh so often oh so rewarding. Especially in cases such as this blog, where I allow myself to write these days simply for the enjoyment and obsession with ideas and words that it provides me.
It still surprises me that it is actually even more scary to write for myself, than for an audience. And often more rewarding.
But. What I find difficult or dangerous about this theory, is I don't want to lose my self. In a world where it is so easy to lose track of who you are, as I have done once before, it really does seem safer to avoid obsession. What is harder, what I am now attempting to accomplish, is to allow obsession but keep self. Isn't the very notion of obsession to lose one's self, and yet whenever I come out the other side of the obsession I always realize that the obsession was with my self all along.
It's powerful scary magic, and I am only an apprentice.
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