Come As You Are
In our century, convenience comes with the push of a button, the addition of water, the automation of a robotic call centre. While clearing the clutter and cobwebs from the crevices and corners from your place, you might be stuck wondering where you fit into all of it.
DSM-IV Categorisation for Facebook Social Anxiety Syndrome (pretend, of course.)
Status changes at least five times a day. Games and applications to the excess that the PHP script is broken. Copious wall postings, usually of inane conversation. Affiliation with numerous groups, syndicates and fan pages. Trolling, flaming and blasting are your favourite hobbies. Your photo gallery is immensely populated, to the extent that you have been asked politely to reduce its content. Disastrous sense of social isolation, segregation and/or perpetual self-comparison against invisible metric of what your friends are doing, who they are purporting to be and what you’re missing out on.
6,834,052,227 billion people are now present in our world. 4,057,913+ hectares of forest is felled every year. 16,228,904 tonnes of CO2 have already been released into the atmosphere. 9,716,799,700 kWh of electricity used this year so far.
With numbers this large, you can’t help but feel a little insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As a subordinate at your job, a number in a sprawling society and a struggling soldier of your own ambitions, it’s hard not to feel a bit squashed. But isolated from the whole? That’s where we’re wrong. We are global citizens, and through globalisation, we’ve achieved the means to branch out and embrace a kind of human reconiliation that we’ve never known before.
An academic member of the University who has presided for some 20 years, returned from overseas recently with the widest and cheekiest grin I’ve seen on anybody for a long time. She looked around and laughed and said to me, “You’ve got to see the bigger picture. Here, you’ll only see things through the tiniest lens.” I didn’t know whether I should feel offended or overjoyed at her sentiment.
Then I thought about how nice it would be to travel and be immersed in an experience outside of the comfort zone. That is, until I found myself helping some backpackers, some tourists and interstate travellers find their way around the Sydney metropolis. You come to realise that where you are can be perceived as just as exotic as where they hail from.
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Edmond Dantès’s Inferno: The Makings of A Millionaire
There, on a table, surrounded at some distance by a large and luxurious divan, every species of tobacco known,—from the yellow tobacco of Petersburg to the black of Sinai, and so on along the scale from Maryland and Porto-Rico, to Latakia,—was exposed in pots of crackled earthenware of which the Dutch are so fond; beside them, in boxes of fragrant wood, were ranged, according to their size and quality, pueros, regalias, havanas, and manillas; and, in an open cabinet, a collection of German pipes, of chibouques, with their amber mouth-pieces ornamented with coral, and of narghiles, with their long tubes of morocco, awaiting the caprice or the sympathy of the smokers. Albert had himself presided at the arrangement, or, rather, the symmetrical derangement, which, after coffee, the guests at a breakfast of modern days love to contemplate through the vapor that escapes from their mouths, and ascends in long and fanciful wreaths to the ceiling. -The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas – 1844.
Imprisoned in the Chateau d’If – one of France’s most gruelling prisons of the time – on account of false treason, Edmond re-invents himself in a catharsis of faith, sacrifice and recklessness. He initially makes some foolish and amusing attempts at starvation and self-sacrifice, self-harm and solitude, only to be met with further contempt by the prison guards and the stoic walls themselves. Though he is imprsioned in body, there is no containing his active mind, bent on revenge and liberation. The real liberation, he learns after some great amount of time in captivity, is found by the metric of his own design.
This was something very interesting to read about and reflect upon: how often and how easily we fall into the trap of mass-comparison and the “grass is greener” ideology. While competition had brought him to detest those who sought his lover, and pride obscured the vision of a necessary path to re-invention, Edmond learns patience and stillness are his true allies, and that his supposed loneliness was really the void necessary to be filled by the self-respect that was missing
At first impressions a man of grievous misfortune and the product of a major stroke of bad timing, events take the turn of good favour through a thorough reinvention of paradigms; from the guiding philosophies of a wanderlust seafarer to the refined sensibilities of an aristocrat. And yet this fundamental procurement of “easy cash” bears repercussions and a myriad of moral messages – some more clearly allusive and some more profoundly realised than others. Edmond oscillates between degrees of altruism and shifts constantly through class sympathy that puts him in the favour of almost everybody he meets: this pattern of ‘happy-go-lucky’ and see-no-evil sounds ridiculously familiar for the unscrupulous businessman.
When Sticking To A Good Thing, Is A Bad Thing
One can only wonder what amazing confessions and inspiring questions the mangrove has heard in his time, from the passerbys of the riverside and the leisurely strolls of cyclists and joggers. Would we then call the mangrove a hoarder, for sticking firmly tight to the shoreline and refusing to move his housing of the families of fish and frogs over time? Are his roots above and below ground a symbol of stagnance or stoicism? Perhaps there is much to learn from the floating doghouse that once homed the manner of canine and flea and Farmer's Curse, to the deep sunk shoreline that has seen many seasons of receeding more prolific than one mans' hairline.
In a moment reminiscent of the opening and finishing of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I too am followed by some foul dust in the wake of my short and long-term dreams. Unlike poor Nick Carraway, I am not inclined to reserve my judgement on this particular matter; some awful (but nevertheless apt) advice was given to me when I graduated high school and looked forward with that eerie bout of optimism and fear to the uncharted future. A nagging voice in my mind repeats to be from time to time – perhaps something like the Ghost of Christmas that haunted Ebeneezer Scrooge in his sleeping hours – to be weary of your hoarding ways, for the older one grows, the greater the propensity to hold on to things grows. When I first heard this, I thought it was pretty laughable and unstable advice: after all, what could I possibly acquire that would seem worthwhile holding onto for dearest life?
In the most recent times I gave a bit of thought to that bit of advice and fed it to my insecuries like King Lear would have cast the physic to the dogs; I took to my hands and knees and decided out of a whim to clean out my wardrobe (being weary of falling skeletons, mind you). There are many frightening things to be found there, from socks that have needed mending from some many months of neglect and wear, CD’s of computer games that were once as thrilling as our latest generation of high-octane charged shoot-em’ups, articles of clothing bearing no resemblance or practicality to me any longer. I scoffed and shook my head, retrieved a garbage bag from the kitchen and proceeded to fill the bag until it reached the rim. I didn’t throw it into the large bin outside until several days later, when I finally had enough of haunting dreams and pangs of absolute desire to hold on to those articles of the past.
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