This earthquake/tsunami is, of course, a horrific natural disaster and I'm really disturbed by the images I keep seeing on the news everywhere about the death and destruction in Japan and the West coast/Hawaii. I can't fathom how a nation can even being to deal with such a catastrophe; how you would even begin to pick up the pieces and rebuild after such an awful occurrence.
But on top of the intense sorrow I feel for all of those affected by this disaster, I feel even worse because the biggest problem I have in my life right now is figuring out how the hell we're going to pay for my wedding. There are people who died violently, whose homes were washed away like they were little pebbles on a beach, who have lost everything that was dear to them, and here I am, sitting in my home: safe, dry, with no threat to my physical self to speak of at all.
It's absurd to feel survivor's remorse considering I live a good 12,000 miles away from Japan and I've never traveled further west than Texas and I know nobody who was personally affected in this tragedy. But I do feel guilty that I'm freaking out about coming up with money and the shitty state of the economy and future, and there are millions of people who are freaking out because they don't have a place to live anymore. I feel shallow and ungrateful and spoiled, but I don't really think that's a fair assessment of myself either. Would a shallow person feel as deeply saddened as I do at the misfortune of these victims? Probably not.
This is just a symptom of a greater problem that has been eating away at me. I can't seem to reconcile the two opposing forces within myself. At my core, I’m an extremely logical person. I crave facts and tangible evidence for all assertions; for this reason I am naturally skeptical of everything, especially those concepts that are faith-based, namely religion. I personally feel that all organized religions are harmful to society and inhibit progress towards a better and more equal life for all humans. That being said, I am also paradoxically an extremely emotional person whose actions are strongly governed by feelings. I cry daily (not necessarily in great amounts or even due to sadness), am intensely passionate about my personal beliefs, and I feel more strongly than most people I know (I could watch a commercial that’s an advertisement for a camera and cry because the plot was sweetly sentimental). When criticized, even when justifiably and deservedly given, I am quick to tears and prolonged moodiness.
These emotional outbursts are more than a little annoying, not just for me but to those whom I love, of this I am well aware. But I can’t help feeling that this is something that is just written into my DNA, that cannot and may be should not be changed. This is who I am. Why should I be ashamed of the ability to feel emotion as powerfully as I do? People go to great lengths to “feel” things, whether it be through promiscuity or drugs or other extreme distractions, but I am dually gifted/cursed with it.
Trying to reconcile these bouts I have with existential dilemmas has become increasingly problematic and with greater frequency. The more time I have to myself, the more time I ruminate on human or individual problems and the more I get lost and confused within my feelings about these issues.
I am reminded of a rather profound teacher’s assistant I had while at NYU my senior year. He was actually a well establish and accomplished professional composer/educator/philosopher, and to this day I have no idea why he wasn’t teaching the course himself. Edward Green says this in his essay “Aesthetic Realism—A New Way of Seeing Music, Education and the World:”
The basic conflict in the human mind (is)…the Self and World conflict. In every person there is a drive towards the caring for and pleasing of self; in every person there is a drive towards other things, a desire to meet and know these. Often this drive towards self as an exclusive thing collides painfully with the drive to widen the self...
I think that pretty much sums up my internal conflict. His philosophy; that of Eli Siegel’s Aesthetic Realism, is extremely applicable to my conundrum. Aesthetic Realism is the acceptance of the opposites in reality, and its central idea is that the world, when seen aesthetically, can be liked because it is a structure of opposites and that structure is akin to our own nature and our own hopes. I am structurally opposed, then: a rational creature that is prone to extremely irrational impulses. This is normal, the nature of existence is a union of contradictions. So why do I have such trouble balancing the two halves? I wish I knew…
