Shadows and City Lights
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“You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy.
You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like.
If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way.
Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference.
Your new self is not like that. Your new self is the Great Chicago Fire—overwhelming, overpowering, and destroying everything that isn’t necessary.
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- Calvin: Isn’t it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humour? When you think about it, it’s weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it’s funny. Don’t you think it’s odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?
- Hobbes: I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.
- Calvin: (after a long pause) I can’t tell if that’s funny or really scary.
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“To belong nowhere is a blessing and a curse, like any kind of freedom.”
—Leah Stewart, from The Myth of You and Me (Shaye Areheart Books, 2005)
(via fuckyeahexistentialism)
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Reblog if you’re old enough to get this
Laughter. Horrified laughter.
oh god you still haunt my dreams
That should not be as funny as it is.
Oh my goodness, I had erased this from my mind. I want my selective memory back!
(via wearedust)
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“Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.” — Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good & Evil (via fuckyeahexistentialism) -
“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.” -
“We all carry within us a our prisons our crimes, our destructiveness. But to unleash them in the world is not our duty. Out duty consists in fighting them in ourselves and in others.” — Albert Camus, L’Homme revolte, p. 373. (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
