23 de Julio
[A Stream of Consciousness Essay.]
I’ve been meaning to talk about this since yesterday. While I was writing at the coffee shop, an absolutely beautiful girl walked in. I thought I ‘d try to run game and talk to her friend, but I got scared and all I could do was compliment her friend on her dress and run away. That backfired because then her friend came up to me and gave me the business card of her church and said that I seemed hungry. Said it looked like I was looking for answers.
If I was in California I wonder if I would have reacted a little different, thanked her and told her no I’m really not interested n going to her acoustic guitar playing, “opening up to the spirit” church, but I knew where I was. In the south in a hipster ass Christian Coffee shop. She told me how she used to be into New Age stuff (which is really old age stuff if you think about it. I mean what’s New Age? Zodiac, Tarot, and crystals. All shit that's been around for a very very long time, but anyway).
She told me how when she converted to Christianity that there was a spiritual retaliation from the other spirits she was working with before in the New Age world. And I thought that was so interesting, that that line of thought hasn’t changed since Constantine. Let’s just call Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, and Pan, the devil. But hey, whatever works for her. As I’m writing this, I hear the barista telling his coworker in their own conversation “…and that’s why Christianity has failed. People want everyone to do what they are doing. You have to teach it out of love and then just let go.”
Anyway today, she was at the coffee shop again and started asking me a lot about myself, so I told her.
“You’re pretty brave for a 24 year old to go across the country and following your dreams like that.”
I told her how I didn’t feel brave, but then we both agreed that maybe me not feeling brave, me feeling scared, me feeling doubtful or like I don’t know what I’m doing is a part of me being brave. Because I feel those things and I do them anyway. She asked me how much I was earning and I told her how I was earning less but I am doing things I care about here and now.
And this is the part of my realization where I realize that right here and now is so much better than anywhere I’ve been before. I would take right here and now, where I am in my mental state and soul, over any other part of my life. Even when things were a little better externally, or location-wise, I’ve never been more secure in my own beliefs, and I’ve never taken more time to do the things I care about, to be conscious about my mistakes and learn from them, to push my comfort zone, to bite off more than I can chew and chew it.
There are plenty of times when I think about really cool details in my past and instead of appreciating them as part of a really cool collection of moments I call my life, I miss them and then try to concoct a plan to replicate them. I pull a Gatsby. I try to live in that pre-war moment of perfection with Daisy, instead of enjoying the life that I’ve created for myself. This morning, it was Clarky and the way that we would keep our house unlocked and she would just walk in and out to talk to me and hang out when she was avoiding her house. I missed all of that. First, the open-door policy of my house in Santa Cruz, the fact that it was part of the international community, and the fact that one of the most beautiful women in the world was walking into it willingly, sometimes to take her clothes off with me.
Something I’ve been learning about recently is turning lust into appreciation. And I think I’m lusting after the past in a big way and missing what's right in front of me. Don’t want to do that anymore, so I guess that means I’m just going to have to keep feeling scared and maybe a little lonely as I keep pushing my boundaries and try to grow every day. The principle of appreciation, as opposed to lust, is the idea that you don’t have to always do something with your energy. If I get a fond memory of the past, I don’t need to look back at it and wish I was still there and wish nothing changed. Part of the magic of international living is the cost of saying goodbye and saying it often.
I knew that getting into it. Far better when these memories come to me, just to appreciate them and how cool that was that I could be reading on my couch and suddenly the door would be open and Clarky would plop down on the couch next to me and I could snuggle up next to her and keep reading. We’re on opposite sides of the world now and that’s also beautiful. I don’t need to concoct a plan to go find her, just like if I’m horny I don’t need to masturbate. I think a lot of us are haunted by the need to constantly do something with our energy, we don’t know how to just sit with it and live with it for a second. But I’m learning how, and all this failure in it is simply part of the process of doing it.
