The Cumulative Effect.

And after a long winter, the frequency of these posted ramblings is on the rise. As always, forgive my sporadic subject-jumping and pseudo-necessary crypticism.

I feel stunted. I feel as if I realized my brand new desktop rig is actually outdated. I feel like I am second-place, constantly. I feel like catching up is a challenge I don't really want to accept.

Being hyper-involved with my job has not been healthy. I find myself enjoying being the store Superman, but the scope of my responsibilities (with respect to my rate of pay), is far narrower than I am professionally comfortable with. In other words, I am bored of it.

I've been able to come to terms with a maxim I have been struggling with lately:
"What we give to and take from one another is neither obligation nor bequeathal but a decision made of our own volition."
This corresponds with my idea of responsibility and the duality of mental cognition and emotional desire. To clarify this, I started to refer to these two different aspects as me and Me, respectively.

Following that, I have stressed Myself almost to a turning point. (Responsibility, apparently extends beyond just one's life in consideration to one's involvement in the lives of others.) After shying away from romantic connections, I have been exploring what makes relationships significant, and in doing so have become a prominent figure in this community. My participation in these group dynamics, coupled with my penchant for non-contaminating observations, I've set myself up for a new train of thought: The Ethical Responsibility of Intervention (ie "homies help homies, always"). That's not to say that I've been disciplined enough to tame my bestial passion for amorous intimacy, which by definition is enough of an explanation for the degree of taxation my mind has taken.

However, through these most recent fits of fondness I am taking the opportunity to truly understand what pain is. To be trite and inaccurate, every influential philosopher or artist has gone through a unique understanding of human emotion, especially pain. Pain is a subject that I have sought to reduce to a set of simple terms, through motto's like "No pain, no gain," and "Pain is a state of mind," or "Pain is just weakness leaving the body." This was a feeling that I had fought during my adolescence, and had fallen into following an unsuccessful romantic episode. (It always comes back to these, doesn't it?) With my propensity for masochism, pain was not a sensation I wanted to even sub-consciously allow back into my life.

My idea now is that pain, suffering, anguish, distress--however it may make us wish for death--epitomizes life in its own macabre way. Though I preached of the eastern philosophy concept of balance, I had not yet put it into practice, nor embraced it in my faith. My mantra was one of emotional rigidity, not emotional fluidity.

The other day, I saw this inscription on a tile at a local park: "Life is a daring adventure, or it is nothing." This hits home because of my need to qualify my existence, especially using a quantifiable purpose or result. When I presented this value to a very close friend of mine, she told me, as she had before, to "let yourself feel something." (Or maybe I would be letting Myself feel.) My zen-like tendency for responsibly justifying emotions before they were displayed caught a snag. Was I authentically feeling anything anymore?

See, for a year after my last relationship, I found that in spite of all the rationale and reasoning, I could not help my emotive outbursts over anything that may have brought my ex to mind. My willpower had met its match: itself, in its unbridled and most dangerous form, love. Unfortunately, I inadvertently scarred myself through a year of stoicism. My humble altruism was turned into a robotic system of efficiency, where my needs and wants were innately secondary to all else. I had no capacity to confront my own feelings because I didn't understand them anymore. I became cold, but presentable, like a geode. This trait was almost solidified by another unsuccessful drive by of an affair.

Recently, I have taken to the development of my personal philosophy. Part of that is the concept that every moment is an opportunity for betterment, and (aligning my ethics uncomfortably close to the Aesthetic Realist philosophy) that open-mindedness allows for the reception of knowledge. Armed with this, and some much needed encouragement, I have allowed this self-deceptive illusion of a tryst, and all that it may or may not entail, to play the catalyst in my emotive transformation. No longer will I seem so aloof and nonchalant, too cool for everyone, including myself. I have become vulnerable to vulnerability, dropping my charade for one set of control-group-style honest interactions. I hope that I'm not making a mistake, risking a stability, albeit a toxic one, for an entirely new set of risks.