sui geniorum

I intended to write a grand post for the new year, looking back on my new year's post from last year and commenting on how things have and haven't gone according to my expectations.  On a tour of my archives, however, I found a tremendous gap between October and March...no new year post was given in 2014!  Which is not to say I didn't write one; I just didn't feel that the one I wrote was worth sharing.  I still don't, so you have to deal with mere echoes of reflections on an unpublished document.

2014 went almost exactly as I expected it to, and it was awful.  I don't usually anticipate to have a terrible time, but all the pieces were in place, and I expended a tremendous amount of energy to find myself in fundamentally the same circumstances from winter to winter.  Or was it to keep myself in the same circumstances?  But, you know, we move forward.

The process of maturing comes in fits and starts, but at last, I can feel it happening.  For the first time in my life, I can know a fact, hear someone utter something contradictory, and not feel compelled to engage them in discussion.  Well, I call it maturity, but maybe it's just weariness.  At least, I've lost the sense that I bear an ounce of persuasion in my character.  The fastest way to convince others of a point, I'm learning, is for me to take the opposite stance.  Agreement does not agree with me, but it's an endless cycle of acrimonious argument, and I'm starting to prefer to keep my mouth shut.

There are some fundamental questions I want to tackle in 2015.  They primarily revolve around freedom, but there are collateral concerns over friendship, novelty, love, and education.  Freedom is the most interesting to me, however.  This was the most memorable passage, to me, in all of Herman Melville's Moby Dick:

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

Who ain't a slave, indeed?  But there are more sources of compulsion than the commands of others.  There are the quirks of our own personalities, anchors, albatrosses that bear us down one particular path no matter how dreary the outcome may seem.  What's more, our upbringings and mindsets conspire to convince us that these were our only and best options.  How do we overcome ourselves?

Well, first we need to come to understand what really drives us.  So if there's an ultimate goal for this year, for me, it's to break my personality down into its component parts, and really grasp hold of why I do what I do.  WHO AM I, etc.  I just hope it won't be too annoying.

Here's to a magical year.