76

“The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.”

When I first read this I stopped in the middle of the road to read it out loud to my friend Jon. It caught me, and coffee cups usually don’t. “… Just stop in the middle of the road?” was all I heard Jon say. I looked around and the parking lot and surrounding streets were vacant. “Oh, right, all the cars…” I had replied. I looked up from my cup and he was clearly confused. I urged him to look at my cup as I read fragments of it out loud to him. I’m not sure if my cup, or rather the words on it, did anything for him but I had decided not to throw it out; rather I kept it on my desk beside my typewriter. When I came home that night and placed that cup on my desk I couldn’t help but stare at it. It was just some silly coffee cup. Thousands, perhaps millions of them, ordered and made personal by the requests of extra-mocha or whipped cream. In that moment of trying to grasp the reality felt by words on a coffee cup, I thought of William Carlos Williams; when he said “there are no ideas but in things”. Nobody can ever say for certain what Williams, a poet, meant by this. For me, however, this quote is voluptuous in suggesting that it is only in things, or objects, that ideas are manifested and meanings prescribed. This coffee cup and the words on it, this “thing”, made me uneasy. I wanted to know why; why these words on this coffee cup did what they were manufactured to do. Intentional inspiration to the masses; “the way I see it #_” How many dreamers, much like myself, had stopped to read #76 out loud in the middle of a street, I wondered. Objects and intention of idea; I was lost in it all.

When I initially read it, I felt like I was meant to. My energies, in my recent past (and perhaps present) have been committed to thoughts of commitment. (I know!) I’ve thought that if I had commitment, epitomized in three (little?) words, I would feel liberated to roam and live and experience, knowing that I would have someone to love me through, and to the end, of it all. Commitment is epitomized in love, in my opinion. If you are committed to your work, you probably enjoy it and love the consequences of it. If you are committed to a person… it is because you love them. Naturally, for me, everything equates to love. I believe we base most, if not all, our decisions on love and passion and desire; subconsciously and consciously. Even so, having read this, it made sense to me. In recent, I’ve felt like I’ve needed to hear the epitomized. I’ve needed to hear “I love you” because that means that everything will be okay. No matter what. I need the consequences of those words, too, or the personification of those words; to have someone run their fingers through my hair when I can’t help but contemplate my mistakes; someone who will take my hand in theirs and push it up to their face, telling me that I am not inadequate when I feel that I am. Someone who does everything in their power to let me know that I am not alone in my doubts; answering the phone when it rings past midnight to hear “I just don’t know”. Someone who, in affection, doesn’t attack my doubts by interrogating the consequences of having them in the first place. Someone who ultimately understands. Someone who is committed, and therefore, someone who loves.

Composition #76 made perfect sense to me. I could be liberated if committed to and because this made sense, I was uneasy. Am I that dependent upon people for my happiness? At the notion, my soul gasped. This evaluation of my happiness and its derivatives frightened me. I resolved, given time, that it was not my dependence upon people for their love and light but rather my lack of independence and personal wealth of light and love. It’s never too late for a soliloquy. Never.

It’s not what I haven’t heard or what I haven’t felt that should matter. It is perhaps what I have heard and what I have felt, moreover, what I could- on my own. You can comfort yourself and you can regain yourself without someone telling you to, moreover, how to. I need people, and I need love, naturally, but I also need that awareness of ’self’. I am liberated by the commitment in love that others offer to me, but I am perhaps lacking in my liberation in ’self’.

Somewhere in between the ideal and the real, I’ve misplaced my ambition (my liberation, really); my ambition to graduate with a degree in high recommendation, my ambition to use that degree, my ambition to learn for life through places and people. Somewhere… somehow…I have doubted myself and my life possibilities in ambition. It’s easy to give up, and the consequences of doing so are messy. Often times I am threatened by failure or the very idea of failing. This makes it difficult for me to commit to anything. If I commit and I fail, what then? I’m humiliated to the very core. “You’re good, kid, but just not good enough.” In contemplation, I am certain that by hesitation, my “internal critic”, and (ultimately) fear, I cannot access my life.

“To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.”

It’s not the commitment of others that could alleviate my life congestion of hesitation, criticism and fear. It is only ever me. Just as it always will be. If I am committed to myself and that which I see for myself, I could avoid these occasional soliloquies or these so-called “quarter life crisis’”. If I committed myself in work, play, and in love, without complete reliance on others when in doubt, life could be wondrous. My life is not void of the wondrous- not in the least, but it could bursting of the remarkable. You can be your worst enemy, critic, and barrier when you neglect to commit to yourself and to keep the faith. I wanted to take my studies abroad to Prague or Vienna for my third year of University. I worked so very hard my very first semester of university in hopes of maintaining impeccable credentials worthy of Prague. Prague lost its whimsical possibility and I then focused on my writing and the happiness I experience from writing. I received a paper back from a professor my last semester who left me a note on the very last page expressing that my paper was “non sense” and that I have “no creativity and little thought.” It destroyed me and I did not write for months. Since then, I did not take school seriously. I think school often confines creativity and attempts to define and manifest “right” from “wrong” progressively. It can be frustrating and discouraging. Wounded by realities that impaired my magical thinking, my belief and faith in what I could achieve, I never recovered but rather spiraled deeper into indifference to my ideas and dear dreams. When one is indifferent to one’s self, he or she is virtually impaired from his/her surrounding world; priorities change, and what we yearn for is languid in arrival. We become reluctant upon failure; our commitment diminished or tarnished, if ever so slightly.

“The Way I See It #76″ reminded me of Prague, of writing, of desire to know places and people, and of my capabilities as a person if I simply cared enough about myself to commit to my aspirations. It’s not selfish, really; it’s life. If you don’t ask yourself what you want and you don’t evaluate how or why from time to time, what you want is muddled somewhere in between the possible and the so-called impossible, and you tend to side with the latter. What you want is lost, and you become just as lost; sometimes beyond retrieval as you begin to believe in the impossible.

“…remove your head as the barrier to your life.”