Archive for the ‘Diary’ Category
I’ll tell you of my dreaming; dreaming is free
Alright, time for a post of epic proportions to make up for many months of silence on this blog, for it has become merely one of the many backlogs in my life that I seem unable to clear. There are so many times over this summer that I have thought to myself ‘hmm, I could write an interesting blog entry on that’ but I have then dismissed the idea with ‘ah but I haven’t written for so long I can’t just come out and write about this without first catching up on everything else that has happened’. And so it has gone on for months, something I am only now trying to repair at the very last minute before I go away to university for the first time, in the morning at 6am. My blog has a half-finished draft sitting as an attempt at this post but it is too old, too irrelevant, and I feel I must start afresh. The simple truth of the period I am about to describe is that it has been a pretty rubbish summer for a host of reasons. Now things are finally coming together as I prepare to go away at long last, which is good, but I only wish I had got things together sooner in order to make better use of the last four months. Four months. What a ridiculous chunk of my life that has been, essentially, almost completely wasted. Perhaps it is the fact that I have a terribly verbose diary that demotivates me from writing on here. Whatever it is I shall now attempt to correct it.
It’s not going to be easy to attempt to set this out, for I haven’t exactly kept detailed notes as I’ve gone along, and I imagine much of it is boring and repetitive. I will thus start with the most pressing issue. In my life I have pretty much one thing that I see as ultimately and self-evidentially valuable, and that is my academic study. Whether this psychological condition is correct – the way that I see everything else as merely distractions in the grand scheme of things, tossing aside friendships and other pursuits and experiences so easily – is another question, but this summer has made it abundantly clear to me that at the deepest level it is what I seem to believe. Why? Well, this summer I haven’t been studying through school, and have been almost completely incapable of studying on my own, and thus my self-esteem has dropped far off the scale and I have been miserable with the combination of desperately wanting to be able to do something and yet being too lazy to actually do it. My mother extends this lack of motivation to include a great deal else. She notes that since I got in to Oxford I immediately stopped caring about it; I see this as a symptom of the clash of my meta-desires and my desires. She spent the summer harrying me to go and get a job but I don’t really know how to do this, and while I did hand out plenty of CVs, I didn’t have any success. So with my lack of self-worth stemming from my lack of academic activity, my motivation for pretty much everything else also dried up, leaving me wasting the time away on easy things, rather than challenging ones. And then there is of course a spiral of other issues stemming from this which is what I don’t think I am capable of concisely and lucidly describing here.
So of course I have attempted to analyse this down somewhat more, remaining a non-academic over-thinker at all times, and have perhaps worked out a few things. The first and most obvious problem is something I have been aware of for a long time, and that is my inability to read at a good pace anymore, unable to grab the meaning of a whole sentence and move on rather than hyper-analysing it and imagining the scene in every possible way. Reading is not really very enjoyable due to this: every time I sit down to continue with a book, I have to force myself past my dislike of how much of a struggle it has become, and this is surely something of my own making. I can’t believe that my lack of recreational reading in the sixth form, due to time constraints, could have possibly led to an actual decline in reading speed at a basic level because I’ve been reading in lessons and for homework out of textbooks and novels (the latter for Philosophy…). So instead maybe it simply comes down to being unable to change my reading style to be less obsessed with nuances of meaning when trying to read a whole book rather than a small section. I don’t know. But my messed up reading is probably the biggest component of all of this.
There has been some solace in computing activities this summer, which I seem to have got into a great deal more. This is likely because they are easy: I’ve just been streamlining, rewriting for efficiency, adding simple new features, sysadmining. The fact though that, despite the activities being easy, I have been doing them continuously and solidly to produce something worthwhile was fantastic for me as something constructive. Perhaps then I have simply forgotten what academic work is supposed to be. I am poor, perhaps, at doing things that are supposed to be difficult and that tend to be better for this in the end. My old Philosophy teacher once said of me that I do the subject ‘because he knows it is good for him’ regardless of the whirlpools of confusion one can be drawn into, struggling to tread water to understand, struggling for clarity. Perhaps I need to re-learn to live like this. I have no idea how I will slot in academically at university; I only hope I can sort things out so I have something constant to rely on, as that is how humans tend to work. This is all I have to say. The problem and my basic and current thoughts on it have been stated, and wallowing in this any more would not be helpful. I have a fresh start at Oxford tomorrow.
I decided to commence preparation for ‘going up’ (despite it being to the south) in September, which essentially means working on Maths. I feel that after doing an A-level in Philosophy I have the background reading for that side of my course (although I have been enjoying a fantastic book on logic, which I am really looking forward to), but my Maths ability has flown away over the summer as it is apt to, or it certainly has for certain topics. Oxford have provided a number of worksheets to help one prepare and I have done a great deal of them, but my ability varies quite a bit. I can fly through the calculus and the messing about with polynomials and other simple functions, but there are certain techniques, such as most forms of differential equations, that I have completely forgotten, and others like matrices that I have never done before. I should then have allowed myself more time to get to grips with them. A friend who is going to Oxford for Physics this year was invited to go and spend an extra week before Freshers’ Week going over A-level Maths, and the various bits our particular course didn’t cover, and I really wish I’d been able to do this too. I will thus spend a great deal of Freshers’ week trying to get up to speed because Maths is my weaker subject out of the two I am studying and yet it is something I must avoid falling behind on.
This is pretty much my only concern about going down: my academic situation with regard to Maths. I imagine lots of others will be in the same boat but that doesn’t make it acceptable to have not started as early as I should have and got better prepared. But I am trying to convince myself that this is not something I can now affect and should instead leave alone as something I can try to make some headway against during the first week. Otherwise I am very excited about what everyone says tends to be a new life. I am really looking forward to being very poor, because I’ll end up even less materially concerned than I am now (which isn’t much). I imagine I’ll fill up my spare time with societies, because that’s what I did at school through all my lunchtimes, since I seem to find plenty of motivation for those sort of group activities. I have ringing, debating, computing, gaming (i.e. pen and paper RPGs) and philosophy on my list thus far but, without compromising my time spend studying, I think I could potentially add to this.
And then there are the subjects. Once I can get over initial difficulties and even myself out with everyone else, I feel like I am essentially starting what in the past year or so I have chosen to dedicate my life to. The scholar of theory, for that is my only concern, is often piled high with scorn; yet I seek nothing else as already described. The regimentation of an actual course should sort me out somewhat. To think, freely; to learn about the fantastic ideas of others and perhaps suggest a few simple fancies of one’s own, all the time remaining firmly atop the shoulders of those giants of history past. To be so so aware that we know nothing, and how that is a fantastically rich state of mind. As it has been said before, philosophy (and any subject really) is a conversation with the greatest minds of today and the greatest minds of the past. I’m not one of those greatest minds, but I’ll be around some of them down – sorry, up – in Oxford. I imagine the social side of things will take a while to get going for me though. If the crowd is anything like that I met while down there for interviews, I will sit quietely and get on with things and not worry, like most freshers, about trying to make as many friends as possible. Such things are better left to happen by themselves.
So it is probably clear that while I have written off the summer, I have now finally got excited about going to university. I am actually making use of a term I have never really had any use for before with regard to myself, and that is that I am making a fresh start. It is worth however writing a little about leaving school for I now remember once more the poor state of things on this site. Exams and revision were the usual mess they are for me. I can’t revise and I spend my time fed up with the ridiculous system I am in, and then because of this don’t care one bit about my actual results unless they are below what I need for the next stage. While I noticed a few interesting module results on results day I didn’t look at anything in detail once I had worked out that I had what I needed, as they are just not important. My folders of A-level work are my achievement, the thoughts had and essays written and problems solved, not the revision or exams in any way at all. My last exam though, in the highest pure module of A-level Further Maths, was elegant and doable so I had a fine finish.
The Sixth Form is a rather short phase of education and life in general but I feel it has been pretty significant for me. The most obvious and important thing was my discovery of the subject I now want to spend the rest of my life on, which needs no further mention or elucidation. My chronic brevity at GCSEs switched over to a horrific capability to produce waffling text and I actually started to appreciate language itself, which is not something this blog tends to see. I’ve realised many prejudices I had and developed many more, but with slightly more awareness of these than before. For the first time since maybe primary school I was fully involved in my education and relishing every opportunity to learn something new. Others will probably say that I opened up and integrated or whatever, having far more school friends than I had before. This is probably the case. But I never lost my willingness to be as different as is necessary to achieve those goals that my reason leads me to. Fundamentally, the biggest thing that seperates me from most people I know is this. I am never self-concious, never afraid to do what seems to be right. And whatever mistakes I make and whatever time I waste, I am proud to have this at the end of it all.
Perspective
Hindsight is, it seems, the only true sight, and only when we look back on things and discuss them with others do we tend to be able to truly put them into a reasonable perspective, something that sees their consequences and implications in the most realistic light. It is particularly amazing, I find, how much what we are doing right now or what we are involved in or what we are trying to read from other’s words and actions seems so amazingly significant at the time we are doing whatever it is we are involved in, compared with how insignificant they later seem. This is, I imagine, due to the hold that emotions seem to have over our ability to judge situations. It is always a worry to me how dependent we all are on such forces. I’d like to think that I am less susceptible than most, but how do I know this is not just because I hold positive feelings about the things I engage in? Maybe my perceived ability to ride through things that upset others is just because of a certain emotional set, not a lack of one. But again, this is something that changes with time. Our own point of view of events is incredibly significant in our ability to deal with them. The question is then whether or not there is a better set of views to hold in order to not be held back by emotions but only having them serve as bolstering, useful forces. For many years I have maintained that there is but while I’m still fairly sure of this I seem to make little progress towards it. Just maybe, human life should be something infused with passion for what is perceived to matter – for otherwise it seems we have little reason to do very much at all, aside from simple biological ones.
The worrying thing about all of this is that at the end of the day, I am faced with the arguments from pure utilitarianism that in fact any claims I make to be doing something with any kind of meaning and worth could always be derived from the positive emotional state that I seem to gain from such pursuits. It is depressing to consider the possibility that all of these high-minded claims we all try to make to living what we like to call rich and fulfilled lives in which we flourish potentially all collapse with startling rapidity into mere attempts to release certain chemicals in the brain. But I’m not sure this argument is quite so deadly as it sometimes seems. Perhaps happiness can be equated with something being ‘good’, as merely a definitional reaction to certain events which we see as either worthwhile, fun or interesting. I’m not going to try and develop this argument now as I’m not entirely sure why I sat down to write this post at all, but it is something to consider. I maintain my scepticism. I don’t know anything but merely work on through life according to my nature, and try to examine it as I go for if I did not, it would be just another life, even less significant on the scales of history than it already is.
So is there a useful conclusion from these considerations? One is, I believe, simply to keep such considerations in mind. When an event or person or idea overcomes the senses and dominates the mind’s thoughts as it twists through the day’s considerations, stepping back is a useful tool. Take things slowly, get other opinions, recognise the deficiencies of one’s own intellect as something that, when it cares, can let emotion get the better of it. Recognise unnecessary desires as something that experience shows will be fleeting but don’t destroy them, merely add them to an ever-growing list of considerations and ideas to be tried if life offers such opportunities. For you never know where you’ll go next, who you’ll meet, or what you’ll be doing – and if it will perhaps seem, at the time, to be of the utmost significance.
Some realisations and some conclusions
Humans tend to do well when they have a goal in mind and something long-term that they are aiming for – the only suitable replacement for this in ensuring that one progresses through day-to-day life is, I think, either having achieved said goal and spending one’s time in the results of that success, or simply making use of habits built up over wide expanses of time to continue plodding along in mediocrity. For example, someone who is maybe approaching their middle years and is just working and playing and sleeping through their time with no goal in sight is just following what they’ve always done and the human mind is good at this. A school pupil or other student who doesn’t know where they’re going and lounges around all weekend suddenly pulls themself into the classroom from some sense of duty born out of having done the same thing for the last eight years of their life. Then there is the contented retiree, bumbling around their garden and caring for the grandchildren, happy with what they have done in their years and what they have maybe created or sustained. Then there are those with a clear goal in mind who work to achieve it. The young person who, unpriveledged under modern capitalism, works for years to save for the chance of going to University or some other institution to fulfill their various dreams and who drags themselves to their monotonous, under-paid job every day where they are fed small reward that somehow pretends to consider them a person, all for that future goal. Those who don’t fit into these categories don’t seem to get a lot done in any respect. I am not referring to those hedonists who have chosen that way of being, but those who have fallen into it.
I don’t know how good a model this is for humanity’s collective number but I shall work with it for now, for I have a great deal that I wish to write about this evening that has been brewing away in my head for a while and is finally at a stage where I am prepared to let it loose upon that small section of the world that will read this. Bear with my seemingly unrelated thoughts in the hope that they come together at the conclusion of this text. I’m coming to the end of my two week Easter holiday and overall I have not had a fantastic time. I have gone to bed late successively due to not being able to put down and cease participating in interesting activities, few of which have actually had any real value. And following this I have got up far later than I ever normally would, ruining my sleep schedule. Losing this time in the morning has messed up my ability to get things done and as a result the holiday has been incredibly unproductive. And this has got to me a great deal. I seem to be naturally wired up to be fairly lazy and yet conciously crave more fulfilled time. Every night I have gone to my diary and written about how useless I have been and how I will try to make the next day more useful but overall this has been unsuccessful. It’s very easy to say such things before bed when you can’t be more useful that day, and far harder to put them into practice the following day when there are distractions to be had.
I have realised, coming clear in my mind over recent weeks with the aid of some others but also added to greatly this evening, various things about myself that I don’t like but that I wasn’t really aware of too. I have long known that I have an inferiority complex and, horridly, am rarely happier (in the sense of glee) than when I outdo someone close to me or they fail through their own devices. I am also aware and have long been told by family that I have a tendency to be fairly lazy and to not follow up suggestions of things that I then find to be worthwhile and interesting. These are the things that I am already aware of and have written about on here before. But then there are other things. Internet colleagues who I get on well with on a personal and social level express their frustration with the fact that I tend to pick up jobs and interests fanatically, only to swiftly get bored of them but remain unwilling to let others in to take up the reins because, cynically I am unwilling to give up power, and more optimistically I am unable to recognise when I don’t have the time or willingness to continue to carry something through. Recently this has manifested in a steadily brewing mess over something I can’t really talk publically about yet which, in general terms, has other people at each other’s throats due to my negligence that I am now attempting to fix. This is something that I intend to work my hardest against allowing to happen again. I am going to rectify this particular mess and then continue in my role only if I genuinely have the time to and interest in doing so. But this is a general tendency I need to try and avoid – for my sake and more importantly those others it affects.
Perhaps more seriously in the context of my proclaimed philosophies is the fact that I have realised how dependent I have become on the opinions of others compared to how I used to be. The vast majority of this kind of thing is not, I believe, generally something that others are likely to notice although I imagine I have friends who are more perceptive than I am. But I have caught myself, with yawning horror, feeling from time to time as though I am missing out and want to be part of the common (that is numerically common) culture around me with all the activities that people tend to get up to, and as part of this, seem to have found myself caring more and more about what others think of me and how they see various aspects of my activities and personality. It seems I am in the middle of a crisis of self-confidence – that last sentence was difficult to write as it sits so juxtaposed with every other thought I hold dear. Essentially it seems I want, subconciously, to be more included – and this is the very antithesis of all that I believe in terms of the way one best lives one’s life, which is by no means an anti-social life, but one that is not in any way controlled by such interactions. More conciously speaking I remain outwardly confident of virtually everything and inwardly confident of everything except my own academic abilities and my lack of ability to use my time well as before. But this realisation, expressed not-so-fantastically here, has deeply shocked me. I do not wish to publically admit specific examples of what I describe here most generally.
Only one side of the story has been shown here as too often when anyone tries to analyse themself too far. While I might be someone who says strange things in an expression of the above subconcious social concerns, I am also someone who, I am told, listens to the views of pretty much everyone and tries to take them onboard intellectually as much as is possible. I have a hefty dose of rationality and employ it fairly successfully in the abstract sense, even if I fail hard at things of a practical nature in the real world, which fortunately concerns me little. I can pull out masses of enthusiasm and energy for certain things, even if it may trail off given time as described above. I think, I believe, fairly well – but I recognise that such a thing is never perfected in a life and I withhold my absolute assent from anything – even this. In these terms I have recently been described as a pyrrhonist by a friend and I am proud (after learning the meaning of the term) to have been addressed as such, and I intend to blog at some point in more detail about this world view. Conciously I am in a situation that I am content with. It seems that I need to reconcile my less concious self with these thoughts so that I move away from my recognised faults, and perhaps find others to be corrected. I don’t know how far the above recognised issues have infected my concious self.
So far I have expressed a series of realisations and opinions about my own, very human, faults and perceived strengths in what probably appears to be a very juvenile mental struggle traditionally associated with my age group, where I try to settle into one of the moulds that society has set out for me. So I should now set out the nature of this mould that I want to slot myself into; how I intend to try to work towards an improved state of being far removed from the problems I have now identified. How I can stop having holidays such as this where I waste my time away despite my claimed allegiances to mental activity and service. And what it comes down to is attempts to get into better habits and better subconcious processes in order to allow me to achieve what I conciously see as my goals as described at the beginning of this post. I need to slow down and think more carefully in common activities. I need to force myself to use my time better until it becomes something that happens naturally, given that I recognise that now it is a natural tendency towards wasting it that I seem to have acquired. I need to apply my reason even more commonly and liberally than I do now to be disciplined with myself. And I need to speak only when I have something genuinely worthwhile to say. And I suppose, additionally, following my various New Year’s resolutions wouldn’t hurt either. I have no desire to destroy my trademark intellectual faux-arrogance that is really pure enthusiasm, or to change from my forceful style once I have decided to pursue something. But by widening when I apply the essence of these and by more carefully selecting when to put forth their public fronts I think I can come closer to my various goals.
It’s very easy for me to sit here before going to bed and write roughly two thousand words on things that I want to do based on deeply held but assumed principles of what is valuable and ultimately meaningful in my life as I go forward. But I truly hope that by writing this kind of thing down I can take steps in this particular direction towards being more fully what I already hope I am in my better moments. I know I am never going to make a life entirely of these, but they seem remarkably few and far between these days and so maybe I can change that trend somewhat. And maybe I am just slotting myself into yet another pre-determined mould sat in by various other people who like to call themselves thinkers over history and am really just slumping into another mediocre life as with the rest of the world. But there is always the chance that I will transcend this, a chance that I know doesn’t exist if I don’t carry out this process of recognising and at least attempting to fix bad habits and practices that lead me astray and into despair over my inability to sort them out. If it’s all wrong at least I can move myself closer to a state from which I can head to a whole host of other destinations. Hopefully for once I have now made a firm step in a better direction.
Results again
There is a definite difference between rationally deciding upon something – whether it be an opinion or an action – and psychologically totally accepting it. I find it is when the latter occurs that something special has happened and yet telling others about such things is never quite the same. I may have been preaching an obvious opinion for years but then when I truly realise it it is an excitement that is very hard to get across to others. I don’t know if this happens to others but I imagine it does. The other day it was exam results day and I experienced one of these moments on the bus in. For a great deal of time I have railed against our exam-focussed culture and have claimed that what matters is the expansion of one’s mind through education as opposed to the completion of certifications of various forms. Exams have only ever been for me a challenge in getting certain grades as opposed to something that actually matters – or so I tell myself. In reality I have long been concerned. Posts on here show that. However, finally on the day of this round of results a few weeks back I finally realised that I no longer cared. Now that I have my university place and the knowledge that as long as I don’t do anything stupid I will meet the grade requirements for it, it is very easy to say this. But it really was a wonderful moment when I finally realised that the results meant nothing more to me than a gateway to this next advancement. And I thought it was worth writing about here. It is wonderful to know that I can truly enjoy the intellectual aspects of my subjects (aside from the intolerably dull Medical Physics) without being concerned hugely by exams, especially given the low percentages I need in the summer to get straight As. I do not mean to sound too comfortably secure here – the lack of enthusiasm I was able to show for friend’s results a few weeks back annoyed me. But I’d really like to think that were I not in this comfortable position regarding results, I would have eventually come round to this opinion regardless.