Discipline.

I am too easy on myself.

I try to live in the moment always. What I find is an inconsistency that I disagree with. Through the Buddhist perspective, we are never the same. I believe this, but I feel I waver from the tenets of my beliefs too easily. 

I say, "It's okay Rico. You can try again later." In one aspect, that's great. I don't live in regret because I know I can always do better. On the other hand, I am never progressing to what I ultimately want to be. I want to be beautiful, inside and out.

At the end of day, in the dead of night, I know inside if I really tried all day to be all that I CAN BE. Lately, I can't say I have. So, today, I start again. I WILL be beautiful, and I WILL beautify the world as best I can.

Becoming me.

I believe I'm settling into the quintessential me that will be for the rest of my life. I know there will be plenty of adaptations and learning, but they will address the particulars. I have found the essence and nature of me, and the rest of my life will be spent fine-tuning and applying. I started getting this feeling leading up to my 22nd birthday and have somewhat been validating it thereafter. It's a comforting feeling. It's a direction towards that "experienced, comfortable old man" I've always wanted to be and felt inside me. So what is that exactly? What is it that makes up this concept of an identity I call myself?

I believe in love. After all the spiritual, philosophical, existential, transcendental etc... questions that lead up to "What's the point of it (life) all?", love is what transcends. It is the purest, most valuable, and fulfilling thing we could do/create with this life.  How one does so doesn't matter as much as the pure intention of it. With this as my core, it resonates throughout the rest of my being.

I want to help humanity, and I want to do it directly. I've spent my whole life being a keen observer of human behavior. Why do people do and think what they do? I know most do this, but I don't think to the same thoroughness that I do. Then I asked myself, "Why do I care? What's the point of my observations?" I find that for one, people are my favorite art, my favorite book, my favorite movie, and so forth, thus most interesting. I think they are the most dynamic, possibly surprising subject in all of life. Secondly, I want to relate so I can connect. I want to connect so they can matter to me, we can matter to each other, we can beautify and share each others' experience of this existence we call life. 

As far as how I can help humanity directly, I know communication has a lot to do with it. My ability to communicate is something I cherish and find I have a natural knack for. I find it is my best means for connecting. I'm all about intimate conversation. More than anything, how people are feeling at the present moment about life is what matters to me.

I find that I very much cherish beauty, wonder, and just sheer interest in life. It is what gives me fervor for life. If I find that I am not somehow awed or at the very least interested in some anything about what I am experiencing at whichever moment in life, I am very much numb to it. It is the recurring negative episode that happens to me. I just get bored for life. Little of it affects me. I never really got mad, and I don't get terribly sad anymore, but the worst for me is I get a little paralyzed to it. My reasoning for why I think it's negative is because I can't appreciate it on any scale. I feel like a spoiled child, given the gift of life, and I can't even appreciate it.

These days, I've been able to will myself, in a sense, to appreciate it. I just get back to the moment and realize it's all I've got. As Adam, truly a kindred spirit and brother to me, would say, "Eternity is Now." So simple, so true. I hope these words affect YOU (reader) at all. I love you. I wish you well :)

In Psych. class,

the professor likes to ask people to share personal information for the sake of making a point, and, I think, for the sake of being unique and having a challenging approach in a psychology class. He usually precedes the question with, "If anyone is honest enough to say, who...?" 

Well, the other day, he asked, "Is anyone lonely?" I raised my hand without hesitation. Then, he followed with "Does anyone have a problem with love?" I did not raise my hand. I thought it peculiar that I had contrasting responses. Although I could admit to being lonely, I wouldn't say I have a problem with love. I think because I personify love as a whole concept and truth and felt it wrong to say I have a problem with it. It is what it is and I accept how it is, through the pain, through the loneliness.

A week earlier, I had the same essential thought. In a description of an afterlife in The Myth of Er by Plato and in many other descriptions of an afterlife, they speak of living the happiness of this life on a multiple scale. I tried to imagine what that might mean specifically to me. So I figured it would be to be in love void of heartache? And that didn't really make sense to me. Love is a process, much like life and nature. To experience it on an exclusively pleasurable level didn't seem complete. It brought me back to appreciating this life, this opportunity for all its pains and pleasures. And then I read something somewhere that asked, "Can there be love without pain?" I think there CAN BE, but I guess pain gives it something to be compared to. Something to accentuate its true significance.

To relate it to the current events of my life: a couple of days ago, I heard some news that bothered me later into the day and night. Luckily, an insightful caring friend said ever-so-beautifully and simply, "At least you got to love." Oh so true :). It reminded me that anything one goes through before, during, and AFTER is always worth it for the moment(s) of its existence.

I am okay with death.

I'm taking this Humanities class on Death where we survey through different cultural perspectives on death and consequently life. How you view death will influence the way you live your life. I realize through my responses in class that I am coming from a totally different place than most. 

Most are looking for justification and promise of something more. They want THE ANSWERS to why we die, what happens after we die, how do we live to ensure a good afterlife, etc... When I hear people's questions and comments, it's interesting how difficult it is to find peace in not knowing, and also how people want answers so bad that they accept unprovable explanations. How they seem to be able to ignore the fact that they are actually completely active in what they accept as truth. No, they just believe it to be true for all, as if they had no bias. How they are actually just satisfying their fears.

I am okay with death because I am okay with just having this life, this opportunity. My own death is trivial compared to my life. I will live and learn, and when I die, that will be it. I will cease to exist. There will be no great meaning. This idea doesn't depress me like it might or should. I think it's because there is so much in my existence here and now, and I understand that this is just the truth of the world. Things come to be and they pass. I am no different. I understand my place in the grander scheme of things. Also, why stress over the unexplainable, the unpredictable, and a momentary transition.

We went over brain death, and The Phaedo by Plato, and I find that all the meaning and purpose lies in consciousness for me. If I am not conscious, but my heart is still beating, please let me die. In The Phaedo, what Plato calls the soul is what I call consciousness. One day, I will die, I will not have my identity, my consciousness. Rico will no longer exist. I'm okay with that because I won't even be aware of it. I worry more for the living that will have to endure life without me. They will be the ones suffering, not me. So this is for them. My last words will have the undertone of: It's okay. I've lived my life. Celebrate the good memories we shared and DO NOT mourn my death. Let me live on in you and your memory forever. I can never fully be extinguished because I have had an influence on you that will continue on long after I die. Please do not degrade my life by saying I could've done so much more. I was so young. If I die today, I feel I have lived a full lifetime already. I have shared and experienced love and that's all that really matters.

Spring.

I think Spring started for me on my birthday. That day, before I left the house for school, I worried a little about the possibility of having another one of my mundane days. And I jokingly told myself,"C'mon man. You gotta have a good day today." I think it motivated me not to let myself slump into one of my lonely moods. And I didn't. For one, I did get an extra amount of love that day because it was my birthday. I acknowledge that. But, I did spend a certain amount of it alone. Times I tend to think a bit too much, get lost in thought. I know I told myself to give it a break. Not to go so easily into it. I consciously changed my perception in the given situations and made myself feel better. I think before when I would allow myself to feel sad, I consciously did that too. Anyway, doing that made me realize how I think I'm ready to make myself feel better. To an extent, I've been feeling out loneliness for quite some time now, and I'm ready to move on. 

Through the help of good things happening around me, what I call the work of Spring in my life, and my own effort to feel good, I've felt the change in seasons. I'm ready for warmth :) 

I am a lover.

Some words by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay on Love:

"And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover."

"For persons are love's world."

"In the noon and afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret matter, who said of love,-

          'All other pleasures are not worth its pains';"

"The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour."

"The soul may be trusted to the end."

The past and memories.

I used to be able to view the past and apply it positively to the present, whether it be a lesson to learn or simply cherishing that I've already had a beautiful life. Lately, certain good memories are too much to bear.

The other day, I woke up unhappy. I didn't know why nor did I try to figure out why. I just felt it. While at work, I was making some mocha (one of those mundane tasks that allow you to get lost in thought), and revisited a memory of a beautiful girl I "had" once. A girl I connected with and got myself emotionally invested in. Someone I allowed myself to be vulnerable to. I almost cried. It seemed like a fantasy, a dream. It was a life I once lived but didn't matter because I no longer lived it. It's so strange how the past can sometimes feel like it never happened at all. Foreign. Memories like this feel like they are stored away in an ice-case and sent off to drift away forever. Nowadays, I don't feel the warmth of the past, just the bleak reality of its absence.

I'm sure all this will pass sometime. 'Till then.