Turbulence

I've been gone on quite a long hiatus for blogger the past few weeks. I think this might have been the longest I've gone without writing a blog for a very long time. But nonetheless, here I am.

There's been a lot of ups and downs in my life since my last post. However, I sometimes wonder if these ups and downs look like nothing but turbulence in the grand scheme of things. I imagine if I could plot my happiness on the vertical axis with time on the horizontal how my life would look on a plot. Would it simply be a straight horizontal line from a distance, but when you zoom in there are a multitude of variations? Or would there be some events which truly stand out - is my life one continuous function or just the sum of tiny piecewise events? Can we accurately compare happiness in one moment with that which we felt in another? In my opinion, I think humans are pretty terrible at that.

To be more specific the ups and downs in my life have mainly been the usual stuff. For example, not receiving some awards/jobs I think I deserved or receiving marks higher than I expected. I realized in some ways that I am pretty selfish in that I would rather feel better if no one got something that I wanted rather than a peer receiving it. But, like so many things in life, I've gotten over it (I hope!) and I am trying to learn from it and become a better person. OK, maybe I just typed that line so it sounds like I believe I care about changing more than I actually do. But it is something I should work on and I definitely don't want to go through life being secretly bitter at others over trivial things.

I think lately its been difficult not to compare myself with others in many regards. In terms of where I want to be in the future, where I am now (jobs, school etc), and who I was before. Again, I have come to realize there is a very fine line between individuality and maintaining relationships to satisfy the need for social interaction that we all have. On a vaguely related note, I've also thought about, for the umpteenth time, how I just can't possible study/do everything interesting in life. One needs to make decisions at one point or another and hope they end up on a path which is makes them happy.

It seems like just yesterday I was talking to Heinz about how one day I feel like I'll just blink and be 60 or something. I don't think I'd mind too much. In the simplest sense, I just want to go through my life being reasonably content - it doesn't matter if I'm married, have lots of friends, have a well-paying job or not. I just want to go through life knowing that I'm content with who I am and what I'm doing/where I'm going. While it'd be great to have a positive impact on others and accomplish something which I internally can be proud of, I'm not sure if that will realistically happen.

The last thing I just briefly wanted to mention is about high school. Recently on facebook someone posted a video from our graduation. It made me feel pretty nostalgic but I realized I couldn't really remember what it/felt/ like to be in high school anymore. It was like...I couldn't even think of what it'd be like to go back or think like how I use to think back then. Perhaps this is true for all memories...eventually, after some point, our sensations about an event seem to dull and we are only left with memories here and there which puncture our thoughts once in a while. For example, I can't even imagine what it would be like to go back to that kind of high school environment again. It's like a friend who I met in first year said how you can only miss something for so long before it just becomes a good/bad memory. I think I really do understand the significance of that statement now.

Oh, one last thing I wanted to mention. I guess lately I've been more wary about when others are being "phony" or when they really mean things or not. In fact, sometimes I feel like even /I/ know when I'm sounding phony, but all I can really tell someone to reassure them is that I genuinely mean what I say. Perhaps, like Holden in Catcher in the Rye, our need to separate the world into black and white kind of views such as when Holden assumes that all adults are phony stems from a need to just model the people of the world in a simpler way. If we didn't make initial judgments on others based on information we could quickly gather about them then how would one sift through all the plethora of people they interact with on a daily basis and decide who they should pursue trying to get to know or what not? I guess, in the end, we all need to start somewhere - perhaps arbitrarily but it makes more sense to be based off our beliefs?