Framing Another's Story

I think it is possible to abuse awareness of narrative.   I have noted it is a form leadership to help those who are less aware and in control of their self-definition to create positive identities and attribute positive meaning to events.  However, we must be careful to not abuse our power to affect the creation of narrative, which is at the same time creation of self, which others engage in.  People create their own realities, create their own system of attributing meaning, and attribute their own individual meaning to specific events.  Just as we can step into that process and try to help direct it in times where it is beneficial, we can also step in and manipulate this process to the detriment of the individual. 

When we recognize and become aware of our creation of narrative, we become aware of the different ways other people have of doing the same.  And if they create an understanding that is different than the one we have, if they attribute different meaning to an event than we would, we could attempt to do something to disabuse people of their way of understanding things.  What we are doing, in essence, is forcefully removing people from their created narrative, their created world, the world in which they are God whether they are awake to that fact or not, and we place them instead in the world we have created for ourselves. 

We force our understandings, our attributions of meaning, onto other people.  We destroy their worlds, we destroy their realities.  We enslave them to our narrative, and we become a tyrant rather than simply the God of ourselves.  Through the forceful authorship of their life, we become the antithesis of a Creator.  We become the antithesis of a God.  We become an enslaver of men, a destroyer of worlds, a conceptual equivalent of Satan.  Do not take these religious terms out of context.  I mean merely for the conceptual connotations to apply, and in the narrow sense in which they are metaphorical for the process I am speaking of.  God is a narrative tool that many are familiar with, and it is a narrative that I am attempting to tap into in order to explain my ideas.

Forced Appropriation

Side note aside, think about all the destructive people who engage in this forced appropriation of identity creation.  When we think of abusive husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, or parents, we see that they do exactly what I am discussing.  They force you into their narrative.  Their vision and understanding of you becomes your vision and understanding of yourself.  Rather than you actively creating your own identity, you relinquish that power to them.  And a very subtle and vulgar thing begins to happen.  In order to improve your vision of yourself, it becomes necessary that you improve your tyrant’s vision of you.  Your self-worth, your identity, becomes completely in someone else’s hands.  You strive and you strive, hoping and praying for some show of affection or approval from your tyrant because that is the only way that you can incorporate positive understanding into your narrative.

I think the concept of enslavement, the danger and power of narrative control, are not merely hyperbole and rhetorical flourish.  You can become both literally and figuratively the servant of another if you allow them to appropriate control of your narrative.  And once they have control, it is extremely hard to win it back.  That is why in some ways the bond of an abusive relationship can be stronger and more lasting than the bond of equality.  For when both parties are allowed to create themselves, to create their own narratives, their narratives can diverge.  But in an abusive relationship, there is only one narrative of understanding, and that is controlled by only one party.  So the narratives cannot be disentangled unless the enslaved party awakens to the Creator within themselves and recognizes that they can differentiate their narrative, their reality, from their tyrant’s. 

The problem starts with awareness.  Because people are unaware of their own process of creating narrative they are unaware when that power is appropriated by someone else.  The perfect slave is one who does not even know he is enslaved.  As slumbering Gods, not yet conscious of our own powers, we are susceptible to enslavement.  If all we do is live in our reality, and do not recognize that we create it at the same time, how are we supposed to recognize a reality which is created by ourselves and a reality which is created by another?  Unconscious of our own creative powers, we can do nothing but accept the reality and narratives which are fed to us.  We do not question the source of what we don’t understand.  It is our tendency to take things as mere facts, rather than effects in an equation which necessarily must have a cause. 

Yet once we are awakened, once we are aware, we gain the power of manipulation.  We realize that we can manipulate others’ narratives.  When we recognize the narratives that other people are using to understand events and themselves, we can do subtle things to shift that narrative slightly.  I have discussed that this can be done to shift people’s narratives away from detrimental paths and towards positive paths.  But it can be done to accomplish the opposite.  Yet even if we mean well, we must understand how easy it is to become a devil rather than a God, a destroyer rather than a creator.  There can be no sense of entitlement, we must shy away from any feeling that because we have gained control over our own self-creation, that our heightened awareness gives us the right to create others.

For if we appropriate the creation of identity from other individuals, even if we do so because we think that we will do a better job of it consciously than they will do of it unconsciously and unaware, we stunt their growth.  We diminish them into something less.  We kill the God within them.  We must nurture the ultimate power of creation, the creation of self, in other people.  We must pave the way for them to find the God within themselves, to awake to greater awareness, and learn their capacity for active self-definition.  Expanding our creative powers outside of our own creation of self entails the creation of other Creators, other conscious self-definers, other aware creators of narrative, other Gods.  And that can never be done by taking over the creation process for them, by implanting other people into our world of created meaning.  No matter how positive and well-meaning your reality is, other people can be nothing but slaves there.  Aware, or unaware, people must create for themselves.  They are better off as slumbering Gods then slaves.  Our duty, once we become aware, is to engender that awareness in others.  Empowering is creation, paternalism merely gentle destruction. 

Helping Hand
Does this mean that I should abandon my actions to foster positive narrative creation in others?  It is an interesting question, but I would like to defend its continuation.  For, I am merely providing another event which they can unconsciously or consciously choose to incorporate into their narrative.  If I choose to add events to other people’s lives which are more likely to help them create positive narratives, that is perfectly acceptable thing to do.  Say I texted a friend something positive because I fear she may have misunderstood some interaction we had.  Choice still remains and the possibility of awakening remains as well.  She could create any meaning she wished out of my actions, I simply tailored my response to be one that I thought more likely to be incorporated a certain way.  Furthermore, I was directly addressing how my own actions should be understood by her. 

Understanding that my actions could be misunderstood and attributed detrimental meaning, I acted to bring harmony between her narrative and mine. Where our narratives crossed and connected, I wanted there to be harmony, in sync vibration, rather than discord.  I wasn’t working to force her into my own vision of her.  I was working to have her incorporate an accurate understanding of how I viewed her, and hoped that this would be beneficial in how she viewed herself.  I was attempting to have our narratives feed each other positive energy. 

The positive energy that I felt from doing something beneficial for her, the positive energy I felt from the necessary flow of affection towards her this created, the positive energy I felt from feeling that she understood the truth of how I viewed her.  The positive energy this created in me, as it interacted with the positive energy I think it engendered in her, created a positive momentum in the flow of both our narratives.  The interaction of our narratives worked to the mutual benefit of the trajectory of our individual self-creation.  But I realize that the greater gift I could have given is to teach her, or anybody, to become aware of their own power of self-creation.  Of course this takes time, and extended contact, so it is not a viable option at all times.  Those who I have great access to, those who are open to hearing how I view things, people who have a chance to interact with my ideas, those are the people who can see whether or not my ideas hold power for them.  It is not important they think of things with the same terms and words I used, as long as they recognize that they have an active role to play in a process which until that point they had only been a passive participant.  Whatever framework, narrative, or means they use to understand that process and their role in it is inconsequential.  If they choose to understand their role completely differently, that is just as well.  At least then, they are creating.  To dismiss my ideas and replace them with something else is the very essence of actively creating your own unique reality and self-definition.  Simply by engaging with my ideas, dismissing them can only be done consciously and with awareness.  And that is all I wish for. 

Profound Potential
The more awakened Gods there are the more people there are who will actively work to bring about harmony of narratives.  This harmony feeds positivity to the narratives of both individuals, and it becomes a flow of positivity which encompasses both narratives.  Each narrative is individual, each individual a self-creator, but together they can consciously collaborate to build something which is even greater than either individually.  Yet because they are still a part of what they create, each individual creates for themselves something greater.  As more awake to the Creator within themselves, and learn to live as both the Creator and the created, that flow of positivity becomes a stream, and then a river, and then a tidal wave.  Working together, consciously bringing harmony to our narratives, feeding off each other’s conscious, positive creation of self, what happy reality could we create?  What beauty could we infuse into the world we create?  Together our narratives would sing, our voices joining together in a chorus of joy to brighten the collective story that is the human existence.

Framing My Story

The power of framing…It is sort of a difficult concept to put down, especially since I have already explained it out loud before and feel like I explained it the best I could the first time I tried.  Of course, now I have forgotten the exact words and phrases that I used to try to explain it.  However, I will try to put it down in text.  The whole issue of framing arose from an idea that I had in another essay about becoming the mover rather than the reactor.  The idea was that I create my world around me, rather than letting the external world dictate, and in a sense, create me.  While many people are not leaders of other people, I think that similarly many people are not even leaders of themselves.  To become the creator of your own world is to grasp the reins of your life, and take active control over who you are, how you act, and how you attribute meaning to the events around you. 

This last bit really tipped me off to the power of story-telling, even in our own lives.  A story is not simply a recitation of events in sequence, it provides emphasis and substance and intangible feelings and connotations to events and circumstances.  The same events can have extremely contradictory meaning depending on how the author shapes the story around them.  What the author does is attribute meaning to events and circumstances.  The events in real life are no different.  Events and circumstances are merely containers into which we pour meaning.  Of course, the type of event, just like the type of container, limits and affects the range of meanings that we can pour into it.  However, there is always a choice.  Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are constantly creating internal narratives which fill all the various events in our life with meaning, and connect different events in different ways, until different patterns and plots become ingrained into the way we live our lives. 

The problem is that most people are passive participants in the creation of internal narratives.  They let their subconscious create patterns and plots and meanings that are detrimental to their happiness.  They allow their subconscious to characterize themselves as a chronic failure, an unconfident person, lazy, incapable of loving themselves, incapable of loving others, self-centered, or any other defining adjective.  And then they allow the events of their life to be made into reifying evidence of that negative self-definition.  It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy:  “I am a loser, so of course I didn’t get that job, or of course that girl didn’t notice me, of course he isn’t attracted to me”.  People become swept up in their own internal narrative, succumb to it, and sometimes even drown in it.

The Individual as the Epicenter of Positivity 

Yet what I have realized is that we can be active in the process of narrative creation.  I can frame how I am going to understand the events in my life, I can choose which events I am going to connect together into a pattern that defines me, I can choose to alter the arc of my internal narrative plot if I do not like the ending it is leading towards.  I am in control and I can bring the creation of narrative from the subconscious to the conscious.  When I do this, I become the author of my own narrative.  Yet once I realized that I could lead myself in this way, I realized that it was a way in which I could be a leader of others.  If I am intuitive and perceptive, I can help others create a narrative which is positive and resonates as true.  By this, I mean that I don’t think that as people we are ready to accept any meaning for the events in our life.  There are some meanings that ring more true than others.  I cannot simply try to pick any positive framework for people to understand the events of their life, but I must choose the one that they might possibly accept because there is truth and genuine foundation for the framework I try to provide.  Now, when I say that I provide a framework, I do not mean I do so explicitly.  This type of leadership can take many forms. 

The strength of my leadership, the strength of my ability to help create an environment of positivity around me, comes from a place of genuineness.  I have to have a genuine connection with a person to understand how an event could be negatively internalized by a person, and to counteract that with a push towards a different attribution of meaning that resonates as true to them.  It takes a certain level of empathy and perception that requires me to really see people, to see them as the three dimensional, complex creatures that they are rather than two dimensional characters who only matter in the ways they affect me.  In order to reach this understanding, I have to care enough to put out the effort.

I think the power of this type of leadership is that it originates with caring.  People are drawn to accepting and appreciating the shifts I try implement in to their internal narratives because they recognize that I had to care about them as a person to even attempt to lead them to positive frameworks of perception.  I think people are receptive to the positive source of the message.  I do not think that I could do what I do in a strategic, scheming, self-centered way.  Because as soon as I start seeing people merely as means to my own ends, then I lose the ability to see them with any depth or clarity.  I lose the ability to read the internal creation of narrative that others engage in, and therefore cannot see the moments and ways in which I could affect that creation in a way that they are ready to accept.  What I do has to be tailored very specifically to the individual, which means I have to see and appreciate everyone for their individuality.

What I discussed with my Mom was that this was only one aspect of being a leader.  It is a very subtle form of leadership.  It is starts with positive world creation for yourself, and extends to helping others do the same.  I think that it is important as a leader to create this environment of positivity, this momentum of positivity.  It is an environment that people are drawn to.  Genuine connection is like a mass whose gravity draws people to it.  Being a leader in this subtle fashion makes you the epicenter of that gravitational pull.  Meaning that by doing this, I draw people and authentic connection to me.  So what I am doing is incorporating and drawing people into my own life story.  And I am the author and creator of my story, so when I incorporate others I help them with the positive creation of their own stories so that our narratives resonate and give energy to each other. 

Another major aspect of leadership is having a destination or goal to which you lead people.  Now positive narrative creation is a laudable goal in itself, but I think that I can do more than that.  I think all the positive energy that I pull to me by the subtle form of leadership I have discussed can be channeled in some direction, towards some good.  I simply don’t know what that good is yet…I have yet to find my message, but when I do, I have at least found the way to create an audience who is receptive to it, a way to create the energy needed to accomplish something.

Maybe the power of storytelling, of conscious authorship of life, and the ability to expand that consciously to incorporate others is my gift, the vehicle for me to accomplish whatever I was put on this earth to do.  Maybe I will never find my message.  Maybe merely spreading the positive creation of narrative is enough.  I think that it can be a contagious thing.  People who I do this with become more positive, and maybe they spread that positivity to others, and it expands outwards exponentially.  Maybe I can teach others how to be conscious authors, and maybe those people can become aware enough to teach others. 

It is a way of life in a sense, but it is a way that is far from dogmatic.  It is a way of life that operates at a more abstract level then religion, or any other forms of belief or way of life.  You can do and act however you want, you can believe whatever you want, as long as you are conscious of the ways in which you attribute meaning to the events in your life, and choose to do so as positively as you can.  I think that it is a healthy way to live, and that people who come in contact with me for long enough have the seed for this healthier way of life planted in them.  It isn’t something that I argue with them about, or preach to people about, it simply the way I move in the world.  When you are a part of my life, you see how I chose to understand the events that occur to you, and I think the healthiness of it resonates with people.  They begin to try to understand the events in that more positive fashion as well.  Maybe not immediately, maybe it is an idea that lingers in the back of their mind, but hopefully it bears fruit at some point down the line. 

Perceiving The Negative 

Perception is reality, our mind is the creator of perception, and we are the controllers of our mind.  So, we control our reality, within limits.  I think that it is important to always understand the events of our lives in a way that gives momentum to the direction that we want to go.  To be the author of our own narrative is not to become skilled in the art of self-deception.  It requires extreme self-honesty.  To create a healthy internal narrative, we must understand the negatives in our lives as negatives.  But it is important to understand them as the right negative.  Always, that understanding must be constructive rather than destructive.  That way, everything that happens in life, while it may be a step backwards in one sense, is actually a step forward in our progression as a person.

This is not some simple “Look for the positive in everything” type of thing.  It is much more complicated than that.  It is the isolation of negative events, and disbanding of negative plot patterns.  It is the active creation of positive internal plot patterns.  There is nothing positive to be taken away from the death of a loved one.  But having the awareness to use that circumstance to attain a better self-understanding makes it constructive to your progression as a person.  Grief and heartbreak are part of the human experience, but there are healthy and unhealthy ways to understand loss.  Understanding our own feelings, our own emotions, and consciously shaping the meaning we attribute to them and the moments we are overcome by them is very important and useful.

Introspection As A Tool
I think that if we do it enough it almost becomes intuitive, as if we train our subconscious so that we no longer have to do it consciously.  Obviously this isn’t something we can do at all times.  Like everything, it is a balance.  You must allow yourself to simply experience life without constantly trying to control that experience.  But we must give ourselves time to look inwards and really think about how we are going to understand those experiences.  I don’t think enough people take this time for self-introspection, and I don’t think that many people realize how much control they have over the effect of that self-introspection.  Life is such a complicated thing, and we are all muddling about trying to find a way to be happy.  I’m not saying that I found the answer.  I’m merely saying that it is something we can do to help ourselves be happier than we would be otherwise.

It is such a hard thing to try to put these ideas into words, because it is something that I do very intuitively.  It was only recently that I really tried to articulate what it was exactly that I was doing, and it was only once I articulated it that I understood its power and applications.  Articulation is the tool by which I shape understanding.  It is only when we see things clearly that we gain control over them.  Articulation is identification, it unmasks the mysterious.  Mystery dictates to us, only through understanding are we given the power to dictate.  Self-leadership is self-understanding.  As we progress towards deeper self-understanding, we become more ourselves.  We discover ourselves, and the process of that self-discovery doesn’t allow us to mourn who we could have been but teaches us appreciation for who we are right now, because we had to work to discover it. 

Once this is identified, it is an easy extension to say that generally leadership is understanding.  For me, to understand people is to care about them, to interact with them authentically.  So for me, to be a leader is to live authentically.  Meaning, this is not a mantle I can put down because to live authentically is to have the least filtered connection to life.  And that is what I want.  I want to feel life and every moment of it as acutely as I possibly can, to be as present as I can be, to suck as much feeling from the river of experience as I can while I am alive to drink from it.  Articulation is the gateway to understanding, and the expansion of understanding expands our receptiveness to the raw experience of life.  We cannot run from the understandings we reach.  Ignoring our own understandings is when we become the deceiver rather than the author. 

The ideas for this essay were generated from earlier essays, which you can read here and here.

Wading Through Choice

I think it is good to clarify what is meant exactly by the phrase “let go of the outcome”.  At this stage in our lives, so many young adults are feeling almost exactly the same.  It is as if we have been taken on a sheltered boat, our childhood, out into the middle of the ocean of possibility.  And now, it is time to begin swimming for ourselves.  But none of us can see what land, what destination is in any direction.  All there is to see is the horizon, the future hidden by the slow curve of time and space.  We have been told our whole lives that we can be and do anything.  But it is becoming clearer and clearer that we certainly cannot be and do everything.  We have spent our entire childhoods dreaming of so many different paths our future could take, envisioned ourselves doing as many things as we could. 

All of a sudden we find ourselves in the middle of the ocean, and it’s time to choose a direction to start swimming.  We know that our energy and time is not exhaustive, and in many ways once we start swimming one way we greatly decrease the realm of possibilities we will be able to swim long enough to reach.  There is only so many landmasses we can reach, so many times we can reenter the water and toss ourselves into the wide sea of possibility.  Every time we set out for something new, we have that much less energy, that much less time, and the likelihood of floundering before reaching our destination grows that much greater.

So here we are, young adults with the chance to pick a direction for our lives like we will never have again.  The fear of killing the dream of so many visions we have had of ourselves is almost paralyzing.  How are we supposed to move, with so much riding on the direction we choose and no certainty of the outcome of that choice?    I think that this worry originates from thoughts on what our life’s work will be, but I think that it extends to everything else as well.  Depression becomes so prevalent in young adults because I think we see the death of who we dreamt we’d be in every step we take.  We begin to see a disconnect between who we had wished to be, what we wished to embody, and the truth of who we are at the moment.

It is so easy to resign ourselves to becoming this sad shadow of the self we had wished to be because we have already begun to move in another direction.  How are we supposed to turn back now?  That will only make us even more lost than we already are and there is no guarantee of finding the self that we had hoped to find.  So when things are not going the way we wished in our relationships, or in school, or in our friendships, or with our body, or so many other things, it is easy to give into defeatism due to the enormous effect this time of our lives has on our future selves.  It was a game that was designed to see us lose, and part of us is willing to accept defeat if only to prove that we were right to think the odds unfair.

Letting go of the outcome is not to say that you don’t work towards any outcome. You work to put yourself in a position to achieve whatever future it is you think you may want, but you must become willing to accept however it turns out in reality.  You have to be willing to cast yourself into uncertainty as many times as is necessary to arrive at a place that provides you with happiness.  I think that one thing that has really helped me personally begin the process of letting go of outcome is to envision myself as the mover rather than the reactor.  If I am being who I want to be, and divorce myself from the outcome of what that means to everything around me, then I begin to shape my world and my moment to be as I want it to be.  That way, whatever direction I am swimming, I am creating an oasis wherever I am.  Every moment becomes a destination that I am happy to be at.  I’ll have to explain how this works the next time I have the time to sit and articulate it.

On The Brink

Dear Mom,

So I know that you asked me to write you something a while back, and I have yet to actually do it.  I have known all along that I wanted to write something that describes the way I have been feeling lately, to capture it; box in the feelings with words so they wouldn’t pass unexamined.  But to do this required a self understanding that has taken some time to achieve.  Remember what I wrote, when I was maybe ten, that I felt like an open book just waiting to be written in?  Well here I am, ten years later, and that ten year old wisdom has come back to shed light on my current psychological condition.

I have felt restless, anxious, an immense impatience writhing beneath the surface of everything that I have been doing lately.  I watched a movie tonight with Vaughan, her brother and everybody, and after it was done this monstrous, restless impatience came to me again, and I really felt that my mood was matched to the storming energy of the rain and pounding surf outside.  So I sat out there, and just thought for a while…and words started to come to me.  I realized I feel like I am on the brink, on the cusp of some unknown but wondrous realm.  It is as if I have crawled to the edge of the filtered and muted world of childhood and will soon be free to dive into the river of raw life experience and let it take me where it will. 

As I sat watching the surf, those words of ten years ago came back, and I thought that they almost describe how I feel now, but something was not quite right.  I no longer feel like a book filled with blank pages.  Now I feel like the initial chapters had been written.  I, as the protagonist in my own story, have grown, shown enormous promise, become a man capable of riding the currents of raw life experience with strength and grace and an appreciation for the joy that is life.  The build up of my story has been set, the hero has made it through the pitfalls of childhood and the awkwardness of adolescence and any one who reads what has been written cannot help but agree that the rest of the story shows tremendous promise. 

But it is as if the author has left the character here, at this stage, poised to toss his potential into the flow of life and ride it through tears of sadness, pain, redemption, joy, and the legacy, great or small, that he will leave in his wake.  The character has yet to experience any mountains or chasms, he has merely trained himself to deal with that terrain on smaller hills and valleys.  This is not to say that his life has been uneventful, but the character’s sensitivity has always been buffered by the safely limited bounds of his self-introspection. 

When I was young there was time for everything, so I needed nothing.  I did not know how to love, in the full blown romantic sense of the word, and I did not know how to feel loss.  While this undeniably helped me stay centered in trying times, it also took some of the adventure out of life. 

As I have gotten older, life, adulthood, does not seem like it is an eternity away or an eternity in itself.  It feels like it is here now, and mortality is no longer a shadow I am intellectually capable of dismissing as a small, ominous darkening on the horizon.  And with that has grown a desire, which has grown into a need: I need to experience the fullness of life.  The dynamic of my relationships have completely shifted as things which can merely be replaced or moved beyond in the eons of time became finite things which must be cherished and nurtured and appreciated. 

As such, I have grown susceptible to loss.  And while my connection to the relationships I currently maintain changed, so to did my connection with the relationships I will have.  I began to have a need to experience that adventure of romantic relationships, of love, of heartbreak.  I know life will not seem truly full if that is not a part of it.  Where before I was self-reliant because I was self contained, now there are holes that can be torn and filled in me.  The boundaries of what I define as my essential self have expanded beyond my individual self to a ravenous desire for the drama of life that seems to know no bounds.  I have finally come to feel incomplete and small in and of myself, and perceive I have therefore grown enough to be able to love more fully than I ever have before. 

I am poised on this brink of acknowledged readiness for life to begin.  I am ready to truly start living it, and that is as far as the author of this book has gotten.  I recognize that I have that same anxious impatience that makes me read through the night just to see how a story unfolds, because the groundwork is set for the character to accomplish and experience much.  Except now it is my story I am anxious to have unfold. As much as I would like to rush through the experiencing of it to arrive at that moment at the end when the reader and the character can look back at a story well lived, and sigh with satisfaction, I know that would defeat the very outcome I hope to achieve.  So I wrestle with the energy, and the impatience writhes within me like the spirit of the man I will be trying to force his way into existence before his time. 

I am not sure if that fully encompasses what I am trying to say, but I think it puts shape to something that was merely ethereal before.  I am so excited about what my life could be that I just want it to hurry up and happen already.  In that way potential is like a drug, you can never escape it.  It is always there, being whispered into your ear by loved ones and those that want to share in light of successes supposedly on your horizon.  No matter what you achieve, how early or how well you achieve it, it can merely be viewed as an indication of the potential you have to accomplish more. 

I am trying to recognize that no matter how many stages in my life I arrive at to a chorus of “Great job, the world is your oyster now!”, that chorus will be the same at the next stage no matter what I do.  I think what I need to take away from this introspective reverie I have embarked on is that my relationship with the world has changed, and I am more receptive to it.  The faded and muted colors of my childhood world are blooming into a vibrant, sun-soaked palette.  I really do appreciate so many things with an acuteness that astounds me, and I need to slow down and let myself be filled by that acuteness.  But like I said, I have acquired a thirst for it, and I am not so easily sated as I once was.  I can’t help but want all that life has to offer, and can’t help wanting it all now. 

Oddly, however, it is those moments in which that new appreciation is the driving force that I feel most present.  It is when I am with Bella, or talking with you, or making connection with Aunt Cherri, or playing basketball (surprise), or somehow being connected with the things that I have incorporated into my newly defined essential self that my restlessness fades, and the shadow of my future self sleeps patiently for a time.  I think it is difficult in my current location, but when I am able to leave the limited world of Nantucket, and dive back into the real world, I will come back with an understanding that I did not have before. 

The anxiousness has been lurking within me for months, but if I dedicate myself to connecting to those things which, though external, are a part of me, I will feel whole.  And the more time I spend feeling whole, the more the adventure of life will unfold, the more I will live it rather than watch it expectantly over my own shoulder.  I have to recognize that now I am a being filled with countless holes which can be filled by countless things.  All I can do is dedicate myself to all those things which make me feel whole now, and as I experience more things which fill in a hole for me, then the larger my essential self will become.  Maybe that will be how I measure the fullness of my life: by the breadth of what I loved, by the expanse of my essential self.