Pensée Un:
Where water flows is where I think the best. It is my most influential catalyst, provoking my deepest thoughts. Being under the water, feeling every drop of warmth surface me. I can say I’ve finally contextualized and done some thinking. No, that’s a farce. I’ve done A LOT of thinking. Pondering. Exhausting all ideas I have, overtaking every square inch of all the real estate in my brain. I think I now finally understand the problem, and I will tell you exactly what that is.
We want it all. I want it all.
The grass will literally always be greener. I’ve been trying to understand myself and what I want, but like I said, I want it all. I will shortly explain what that means. I’ve been thinking that it would be quite impossible to have it all, but in fact we can. One side of my “yin” fights itself in thinking that I need to continue this stable 9-5 and partake in how the majority of society is run. I’d go to work, then gym, have a few dinners a week with friends when time permits, and then reset my weekend for the following work week and so on. I’d need to save up to purchase my own home, make payments on my car, close out on insurance and so forth. Then the other side of my “yang” fights itself in saying that I need to ditch my old life and travel the world with nothing on my back except a few clothing items and some charcoal pills so I can see this earth and live each culture in its prime.
But what if I can have both? What if every human can have both? Why are we so isolated into one paragon? Why do we conform so extremely to each side? Dedicating our lives to each extreme depending on which path we chose? The force that seems to stop us is the societies pulling us to each side in extremism. Either keep up the stable uniformitarian lifestyle of a house with a picket white fence and kids, or completely drop and forget your old life so that you can live the nomadic lifestyle where you belong to the whole world and then never come home. It’s not right. We should be able to have both through moderation. It’s a balancing act. Do the work, put in the effort to be stable, but then also take the break from there, go travel and backpack far regions in the world to feed that part of your soul without living from paycheck to paycheck. The problem with this is that it’s harder said than done due to the way that our capitalistic society has been structured. You must either live the rat race and have the stellar resume with no gaps depicting you as a “flaky” employee, or you become deemed a “tier 1” human who again has to work random jobs in order to sustain the nomadic lifestyle and provide the basic necessities to live it. We need a more flexible world in which it would be okay to have both, where it is more widely accepted by societal norms. This internal conflict of living either in the nonconformity versus the orthodox life is what deteriorates and deprecates us from truly living life, as we are constantly thinking about the next step towards being genuinely happy and living in the moment instead of having to forecast the happiness to where the happiness is never actually lived.
Pensée Deux:
Another part of me fights the previous thought. I argued that I can have it all, but what if what I chase has been the chase itself after all? Are us humans innately desirous creatures that once we get what we’ve chased for, we no longer want it?
Let me explain to you this cycle of thought and how I’ve come to formulate it using the example of my life for the past few years.
Two years ago, I left my job at Nordstrom as a digital operations specialist working in purchasing and procurement. I thought I was happy at first as this was my dream job out of college. Little to my surprise had I anticipated I’d absolutely hate my life and want to quit. So quit I did. I then traveled to Lebanon and a few countries in Europe. It was good for a while.. while it lasted. In then kicked the guilt of not working a stable job. What did I end up doing? I came back home, to the infamously known rainy Seattle Washington. My hometown, the place where I grew up, and went back to work at another 9-5. This time hoping that the type of job I’d become employed in would make me happier than what I had previously known. To no surprise, I realized I had absolutely hated my life more than ever. Who would ever want to replicate the functions of a robot -become a robot in essence? So many hours a day in front of a godforsaken screen, making my already less than functional vision decrease over time behind the blue light emulating into my eyeballs.
Only a few months into the job, I came home one day, plopped myself onto my bed under the fuzzy blankets and came across a very random video on YouTube. Let me tell you what video it was that changed my whole perception of the world. It was a video of a girl volunteering in Bali. I clicked on it, wanting to see sunlight - although through an artificial screen - as I had been missing the sun shining on my face since I hadn’t seen it for quite some time at that point. I rewatched it, and watched many more alike, and then I asked myself, “What’s stopping me from doing this myself? Why would it be totally crazy for me to do this if others seem to have done it so successfully? Travel in their early 20’s with other strangers in foreign countries? Why does it feel wrong that I desire this so heavily?” I asked myself these questions ‘round the clock for the next week while my fingers froze as I typed on my computer at work, from one fire to put out to the next. Was my life going to continue to be a series of me escalating from job to job climbing the corporate ladder? What would my parents say? Would they even let me go even given my status of “adult” now? No. I refused that this would be my life.
Later that week I came home, I grabbed my laptop, created an account and went crazy on applications to different hostels in Bali and English teaching positions for schoolchildren in Cambodia. I knew I was being called to go and could not pass up the opportunity when I got the interview call and locked down the position. There were HUNDREDS of applications to the Bali positions might I add, and they chose me!? Immediately I put in my 2 weeks notice, no matter how guilty I had felt leaving the job and how great I was treated there. (It’s the guilt of leaving a job that makes you never actually leave, and that in itself is SUCH a HUGE problem for us humans running on the hamster wheel). From there, I got myself ready to go to Bali. The place that changed my life. It’s so cliché, but that’s exactly why clichés have been coined the term clichés. They’re painted in this way for a reason. Just pure magic. Pure bliss. It was beautiful. The way the sun kissed my face. The way my tastebuds tasted how fruits should REALLY taste, and not jam packed with GMO’s and other toxins. I just really can’t explain with words as this is an experience and must be felt. It was beautiful.. until it wasn’t.
It wasn’t beautiful why? You might be wondering. Well, I have said it before in another blog post. Essentially, I was doing it all, the partying the drinking, having conversations with the most gorgeous girls and guys you’d ever lay eyes on. Clubbing in the most insane nightclubs, surfing on the beach, cocoa ceremonies, practicing sound healing, and eating the most extravagant dinners in nothing but my bathing suit since that is the norm over there. I really did it all, and for that I’m forever grateful. And I will be back again, I promise myself that. All this leads me in saying that in doing this, I got bored.
I began growing a void. It grew old. The same thing on repeat over and over again everyday. Lounging at the pool, new faces everyday, the beach, and partying again and again. By the half of the trip I would just go to the beach alone at night and just sit. I’d look up at the stars, watching them twinkle and shine so bright in the sky while the sounds of the crashing waves whistled in the background. In all its beauty, my soul craved more. I wanted stability and I wanted to come home. And thats exactly what I did after some more time had passed. I came home, went to Lebanon again shortly after and then decided to lock in once more. Landing back in Seattle, I started the 9-5 once again. Same repeat process, now making much more money llhamdellah. I thought khalas (which means stop in Arabic), I need to work insanely hard and take minimal vacations to afford the luxe life that I’d missed while I’d been wearing the same clothes on repeat for months in Asia. I wanted to build back to a position where I could buy a house of my own, becoming so financially independent, buying any and everything that I wanted all while being a “girl boss”. And let me tell you, I’m more burnt out than ever.
My brain is on work mode every second of every day. I’m not even living in the moment as I’m anticipating what the next day holds and how many more accounts at work I can open. By the time I come home from work which is a 12 hour day from the time I get ready to when I arrive back home, I’m so tired that I eat and fall asleep without getting back to all the missed calls from my friends and family. No time to connect with the people I really love and care about. Don't even get me started on the anxiety that springs in my chest at 7:30am when I anticipate I'll be late to the office by even one minute in fear of being ridiculed. - I don’t even have the time or energy to read 5 pages out of my book anymore, yet I have 7 different books that I’d like to read all queued up.
So now we arrive full circle, where I had originally started, where I want to leave my job and travel yet again to feed my lust of experiencing what the world has to offer and the different cultures I can learn from. But how can I when the clouding guilt of leaving a job that offers me financial freedom would eat me alive? Where I know that when I come back it’d be almost impossible to get employed at the same tier I’m employed at right now? And the internal fight carries on and on in my head. Always a civil war between the yin and yang that are trying so hard to live in harmony and coexist in the life I imagine for myself.
This world loves money and absolutely despises humans living in moderation. For moderation does not exist anymore in this dog eat dog world.
What do I do next is the question? And that is the question that has been eating away at me for months now.
-----------------------
Let me leave you with this. The myth of Sisyphus written by French philosopher Albert Camus. Albert pioneered the philosophical concept of what he called “the absurd”. The idea around this, is that we live in a world where humans have an inherent conflict between our innate desire for meaning, and the universe’s apparent indifference and lack of inherent meaning. We inhabit an absurd space, yet we are faced with the inability to answer any of life’s questions. How can we live and create meaning despite life’s absurdity? For you to better understand, I have included an excerpt here:
“Camus compares our condition to that of Sisyphus, the unlucky protagonist of the ancient Greek myth who, having royally upset the gods, is condemned to push a boulder up a mountain, only for it to roll all the way back down upon reaching the top.
Each time, Sisyphus must descend and start again. And he must do this over and over — forever.
“The workman of today,” Camus continues, “works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd [than Sisyphus’s].”
For Camus, it’s not just the similarities between Sisyphus and our repetitive day-to-day schedules that make our existences absurd; it goes far beyond that.”
I love you guys
XOXO, Yasmeena
