What Do You Want to Do with Your Life?

It's a misleading question, really, something you've heard from the moment you sat down to Career Day in elementary school (all the fathers and mothers patiently explaining that mysterious adult world to wide-eyed students - we thought it was fascinating once, before we understood the truth) to the time you step into the "real world," suit and tie buttoned up like a well-dressed monkey at the organ grinder (and I use that last word with all its accompanying connotations). Repeated again and again, interrogated, picked apart, spelled out in Lego pieces of little firemen and police officers tramping off to work. Their place in life. What they do. That unfathomable something from 9 to 5.

Well, that something slowly crystallizes, and the rose-tinted glasses fall from your eyes...and you realize, in fact, the question was never completely true (the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth...if only we had lawyers back then), at least, as it was posed so innocently when you first sat down during circle time to share The Rest of Your Life (tm) as you knew it from the sandbox that delineated your entire world back then. Perhaps I might have been inclined to protest if I knew the truth, but looking back, I can't fault the adults for their deception. After all, "What do you want to do with your life?" seemed a perfectly transparent question from their point of view. The view that knew all the caveats which defined "what" and "do" and "want" and "your life," that is.

So perhaps it's time to rephrase the question. Perhaps it's time to let Gorgias take the stand. (You'll forgive me for the poor imitation, but we all have our shortcomings.) "What do you want to do with your life?" becomes, in so many words, "What makes you a worthwhile member of this society?"

...And that's the truth. Simple, right? For those of you already in the work world or otherwise trundling your way happily towards it (as the yellow Lego police man does each day, never shedding his organ grinder suit), it seems second nature. Not even worthy of mention. Of course I am a member of this society, and of course I must do this thing that makes me worthy of belonging. How else could we interpret the question? There are reasons the hand that feeds becomes the Stockholm syndrome that defines the rest of your life, ad nauseum.

But back then, do you think we as children would understand...I mean really, really understand...the ramifications of such a statement? Do you think that we would realize - and accept - the way our future goals were written for us? And even then, when all is said and done, could we ever imagine agreeing to it for...the rest...of our lives? The child who wants to be his hero so stylized cannot comprehend where poetic license ends and humdrum life, mundanity, that accursed repetition begins (for I am convinced Hell is repetition, merely entrapment in a plane one dimension short of what we were meant to live in). And what is this, this "rest" of your life? This "passion" they say you must find and then cling to like a jealous lover bent on squeezing every last drop from your heart's deliverance? (I imagine that domestic abuse awareness month ribbon staring ominously at me from the tabletop could say something to its powers). Even if it were possible to give so much of myself, I would not do it. A love of that sort, no matter how precious, demands something from you that you can never reclaim, and leaves something with you that you can never attain. It is the irony of specialization. Narrow alleyways once visited. Each cog, no matter how finely grained, can never become a perfect circle.

Ah, so then, let us return to the question as it was meant to be asked. As we believed it to be, naive and trusting, back when our worst fears lay in the pages of an R.L. Stine book.

What do you want to do with your life?

I'll tell you now. And if you ask me again, I'll tell you something different. Don't try to find convergence, because the question has no answer, it by its very nature cannot be answered, for who is to say that one of an infinite sphere of possibilities should be chosen out of the universes we cohabit? The very arrogance of that assumption pales my (admittedly deliberate) appropriation of Greek philosophy's mouthpiece. I can only tell you this moment, all the moments that I desire to experience, and ask for no more.

I want to sit beneath a willow tree painting the African cliffs at sunset.

I want to ride the wisps of song through an untouched glade.

I want to step off the edge of Babel with the sun in my eyes.

I want every climax that froze, for just a second, time in its tracks and laid bare the lucidity which led Sisyphus to smile as he descended the mountaintop.

Life is simulated annealing. So says the e-mail signature of a professor of mine. Well, if that is what living was meant to be, then God help me...but all of us deserve more than just an algorithm to abide our existences by.

Multiple Universes and the Divine Chess Game

When I was young, I would lie awake at night with this irrational fear in my mind, that my room was in fact a tiny keyhole and some giant was slowly inserting a key to crush me. It wasn't really the crushing that disturbed me, though. It was the fact that I - my room - was so incomprehensibly small...as if I were falling into some dark pit. In fact, before picking up a single book on astrophysics, I wondered whether the entire world, hell, the entire universe was but a single cell of a vast being. No, not some sort of "God"; divinity beyond reach would have made the disorientation more bearable. Rather, I thought, what if that vast being...was one of many vast beings as sentient and human as myself?

Of course, now that I've come to read a bit about the multiverse theory and the expansion of space, I can put my qualms into something of a scientific context. The thing with theories, though, is that it leaves room open for debate...or, in my case, fantastical meanderings.

Hence, it was with a strange state of mind one day that I envisioned this snippet of an act. Sometimes, the images playing out in my mind precede any sort of reason, plot line, what have you, which the rational side can interpret. That's the fun of literary critics (even better, now that the author is dead). Well, let me lay out what I've seen of the scene so far, and you can tell me what it means.

A close-up of a chess board in what appears to be a long, dusty hall, the kind grandmaster chess players might compete in. It is the middle of a tournament, and the viewer sees an old man - or perhaps not old, but very worn in spirit - sitting at the chessboard, slowly contemplating the pieces as he considers his next move. The game moves ponderously forward, until suddenly, the double doors to the hall bang open to reveal another man, this one young and fierce, with eyes that blaze in frustrated anger. At the beginning I supposed the newcomer to be the old man's brother; that is how the conversation is portrayed. This young man goes up to the chessboard and slams his hands onto the table, obviously furious over something. He begins an argument which the two have had for many an eon - for his is the art of war, as was once his brother's, until happenstance led the latter to retreat from the battlefield into these meaningless games fought over a 8 x 8 chessboard. A brilliant tactician, laid to waste while the rest of the country (or perhaps, world) toils in the middle of war.

Well, the argument moves forward, as the younger man usurps what is believed to be the former competitor (we never see him) and proceeds to finish the game against the older. I have yet to pinpoint the exact flow of their debate, although small bits of dialogue do echo faintly in my mind. Nevertheless, it seems that all eyes are on them until the endgame, and finally, checkmate. One option here is for the older man to win, but passionlessly, as if finishing an eternal duty he has no more use for. Another is for the end to come to a standoff in the older man's eyes, until the argument peaks, and the younger checkmates him in either an unperceived move, or flouts the rules of chess altogether to win his mark. Nevertheless, he gets up in dead silence, says, "You...and the rest of the players!" (finishing on his previous climactic point), hand waving to one side -

And the camera pans out to show that this older man, whom we assumed to be the central grandmaster, is in fact one of an endless line of identical old men, all sitting on one side of the chessboard, the other seat empty.

What I thought to symbolize here (although my initial intention was for it to be two brothers of noble birth, embroiled in a war for their kingdom) upon seeing this is...some sort of cosmic interpretation of God. That is, God is the old man at the chessboard, and the younger one who plays the game against him is perhaps...the Devil? Or even Humanity? We see God, in fact, plays a ponderous chessgame against nobody, retreating from the real conflicts of the world. Or is it looking down upon? The real crux and the mindboggler that links back to my irrational fears in the first place, is the fact that God himself is but one of an infinite series of "divine" players, no more or less significant than they. We worship him only as such as he plays our particular board.

The idea of a single element being more easily related to than a group of elements can be seen in the way humanitarian efforts try to put a "human face" on suffering. That is, as the number of victims rises, paradoxically, we as humans move down in sympathy for the individual. A strange occurrence, eh? Perhaps personalization has an influence...or simply the fact that we do not have the capacity to divide our attentions that far and still retain the same level of empathy for the single element.

Introduction

A professor once told me that she would rather be an idealist than anything else in the world. This was in my first year of university, sitting in a humanities seminar, one of only two or three other science majors (and the only engineering major) in the entire room. I had been accepted into this 2-year honors program to study a wide range of subjects, from postmodernist theory to art historical critique, linguistic models to feminist philosophy - possibly the only education I would get in these area before signing away the rest of my life to the hard sciences and mathematics. It was a truly enjoyable experience.

But more than all the readings, that one line stayed with me throughout. Idealism. To believe in the power of ideas. Often used nowadays to describe someone with his or her head in the clouds, and yet, our society could not function without these same ideas forming the basis for all our actions, words, thoughts, experiences. Wars have been fought over capital, yes, but behind that capital is a certain ideal of who should and why they should - a perfect abstraction. The only question is how to temper the lofty goals of idealism to fit within the constraints of humanity's own flaws.

That's where the cynical comes in.

I looked up "cynic" in the dictionary and found a less-than-kindly definition. Several other sources came up with similar results, emphasizing "bitterness," a certain "habitually negative outlook" and a belief in the "selfishness behind all motives." One even gave a medical definition (apparently rare nowadays, for obvious reasons) "resembling the actions of a snarling dog."

Ironically, the origin of the word lay in the Greek philosophical group of thought that believed virtue was the only necessity for happiness.

Perhaps the best description in my case, then, is to take the cynic as one who questions the motives of others. Hardly an argument for misanthropy, right? But also one grounded in a practical view of humanity shaped through experience (for we all come into the world fundamentally as idealists, I believe) and our own limitations. We assume the worst because we want to protect that which is best, the beautiful, the good, the virtuous - the ideals that have become so rare in a world where "genuine" is used as a marketing tool. We want to make sure that that which we accept as the truth is truly the real deal. In that view, the cynic is the ultimate idealist.

The essence of my outlook is therefore this - idealism must be tempered by critique, a solid grounding in what can be done and how it might be done, along with what should be done to rectify the essence of humanity's problems.

To that end, I have started this journal. Not so much to solve the world's dilemmas as to elucidate some of my own, posit grand ideas that might or might not be possible and offer philosophical underpinnings for my academic musings, which may or may not ultimately bear fruit in the future. Realistic goals do matter, but here, I can write down all those lofty ideals which the current reality does not have room for yet. For while society grows more and more materialistic as a whole, and one increasingly questions the motives behind any person's purported altruistic intent (as if we are all Avon salesmen trying to make a buck), there still remains a small spark of dreamy-eyed idealism within me.

And, as Pandora discovered when she let loose all the evils on the world, Hope will not be silenced.