I don't write all that much anymore. For years, I was a part of a journaling group. People would write about their lives and share them with the group. One of the base agreements was to, when it mattered, try for humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers four axioms for healthy relationships:
It was, for me, a sangha — a place where I could work at figuring out what was really true for myself without fear of judgment. Back in June, however, I left the group, ostensibly over a dispute about confidentiality, but as much as anything I just needed space to think.
I just recently learned the word 生き甲斐 (ikigai) that Dan Buettner translates as "the reason you get out of bed in the morning." Even though I didn't know the word for it, that's what I left graduate school to find.
A choice for this means no choice for that. Living with it is called maturity.
As I was facing 30, marriage and children, the finiteness of my life was palpable. Tomorrow will be the one-year anniversary of leaving Vanderbilt, and I'm finally coming to a point of clarity.
The problem that I have been having for months now is the complexity of my ideas. They're densely interconnected and when I try to pull off a chunk to explain it, it withers and dies. I've been playing with graphs today, and I'm hopeful I can work my way to a coherent explanation. I'll start off with the graph that I've been thinking about the most: deaths versus time.
