Reinventing the "Self"

Are you present? My guess is likely not, though I have been wrong many times in my life. Currently my phone is off and has been since last night. It’s 1pm as I write this at my desk and there is something amazing I hear. Silence. Not outside, though I do live in a home in the Adirondacks where the most noise I ever hear is the howling wind or the rain on my roof.

The silence I am talking about is in my head and it has taken a long time for me to hear it again. It’s why it reminded me of about two and half years ago when my mind was a complete juxtaposition to what it is today. And it is why it caused me to reflect on something I had written then that reflected the state of affairs of my mind at the time, though looking back on it, I don’t know how I managed to even compile the words into such organization to be coherent and intelligible. One reason is probably because of what the very act of writing provided me, which you will soon find out. The other reason is pure determination toward the goal I made for myself.

But for me, more importantly, it reminds me of the origins of my purpose that has guided me to where I am today. It’s a photo of a forgotten mindset and it at least partially reveals why I ripped myself out of New York City and my career in fitness, and out of a life that I loved so much. So here it is:

I watched the world go by, like a passenger on a bus cutting through a city or town for the first time. Distractions had evolved and grown within me like a mutation in genes, an osmosis from the inside out. Finding focus in the world took more focus than myself or anyone had, an ever-increasing debt. Speaking to someone’s face was a thing of the past and before the imperceivable onset of the corruption of my attention span; though I was not the only one, it seemed everyone was going along with me, a useless side quest all together through the screens of our devices. I lived in a digital world and the introspection that had once explored the universe within me had halted.

The internal explorer formerly known as ‘self’ had been taken away to a new fragmented reality of daily living; emails, social media, and text notifications constantly poked and pulled at me. It was an onslaught of external distractions that even when absent, somehow, still existed in my mind. My thoughts and feelings laid not in a digital world but something far worse, a digital context. I existed in shards of imaginations and false hopes of things I could be and would want. Momentary desires dominated and controlled me, tearing me away from being present. How has all this come to be? I could muster up the thought on occasion, in a small chance I had not been captivated by some notion sourced out by a digital algorithm. Books? They seemed a thing of the past, obsolete to the speed and ease in which information and entertainment was now acquired, perhaps something to flip through in the fleeting moments of accidental concentration.

But in all this, I found solace and was able to create and express my will to voluntary recipients, like a writer to a reader. A skill of a craft that produced joy for me, from the sheer experience of designing such a thing, a program, written for people to follow and experience in the form of fitness. In this, I found purpose and creative expression that had my personal touch and for which another person could experience. But the career and personal development is only upwards to a point, its ceiling scratched and scraped by my hand, capping my growth like a plant in a glass container.

Imprisoned in my own disarray of thoughts and entering a time of great uncertainty, my ability to create such things had become stunted, predominantly by my inability to focus. Though in the background, for years, there had been what seemed like a germination in my mind, like a leaf or branch of something potentially great. But of what? It was the seed that had been absent for so long and that kept me stuck at a blind crossroad. It took going so far, the opposite direction, and brimming with superficial distractions, until survival instincts brought me full circle, right back to the beginning, which was an epic moment of clarity. If it does not aid in the path to my own greatness, then it is not important. My own greatness is being able to create, and fitness is the medium in which I have chosen for so many years, climbing to a top rung on the ladder. But the ladder only goes so far up, a direction I no longer aspire to go, a dead end. Instead, I seek to search within myself, THAT being the seed in and of itself. The leaf or branch already there, I realized, is my fiction writing in its youth that I hope to further blossom in the coming years.

Life though, is a non-fiction; mine being a concoction of travels and encounters, gathering up incorporeal rare spices, exotic herbs, and foreign substances to form a melting pot of ideas for the stew of fiction brewing within me. Ingredients whose medium requires paper and pen and no longer a passport and pushups; a eudaimonia of the creative mind, pulling me inward.

How can one write a lie that seems true to readers? Micro and macro perspectives, and a range and depth that can only be obtained through insight and self-examination. The ability to see both galactically and quantumly with all the sandwich in between for the bite. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey showed a rebirth of a human man in this story of an encounter with an alien monolith that was eons old. At the beginning of humankind, one of our ape ancestors had received suggestive signals by a black featureless monolith placed in his troops’ area, to spark an idea. This ape was then able to learn to use a bone as a weapon and strike down his rival ape, giving birth to tool making and setting into motion what humanity would become. He was nudged to tap into the creative part of his mind, watering the seed, and setting in motion the evolution of the human race into a space-faring civilization millions of years into the future, one in which a man travels to Jupiter and is literally reborn as a consciousness.

The human races’ achievements since the dawn of time, though not having been influenced by an alien monolith have been driven by one incredibly significant thing. It comes before skills, talent, and even creativity, and that is imagination; an intangible and limitless resource that can be used anywhere in space and time to conjure up an idea. It is the birth of everything ever created by humans and a power that when properly cultivated and harnessed through the respective mediums can produce magnificent works of art and crafts of all forms, one of which is writing. To be able to produce a finished novel, beginning with nothing more than an idea, and reaping such personal reward is what draws me to write. For me, it is inescapably the ultimate form of creation, that is the driving force behind my aspirations to be part of it.

As a former student of Karate, I have studied under several Sensei for many years and learned that there is no end to its learning. It is a lifelong revision that is honed over decades of practice and molded and refined into a signature style of the art. This is how I view my writing endeavor; an endless practice that becomes my own personal signature as I find my “voice”. Like Thoreau at Walden’s Pond, I hope one day I can accomplish this from a rural and wooded area, free from unnatural sounds and towering infrastructure. Part of the allure for me to become a successful writer is to be unbound by physical location, allowing me to become the kind of writer I want to be.

Ten years prior to the beginning of this story I had moved to New York City to become PART of the world and to feel like I was congruent with a larger entity, somehow connected to the journey of our current civilization. Not long after, seeking a degree in International Studies further provided me an opportunity to visit Africa on three separate occasions, even after all my foreign travel as a Marine. Still, this big city, other trips abroad, and my career in fitness through a pandemic has left a feeling of a journey lost and the need to discover my own path. Though there is always so much more to see and experience, my newfound focus has cleared the way for me to write, which to me, is the most important and fulfilling thing I have ever discovered for myself.

Whatever the outcome, I will continue to write and hone my newly discovered passion through persistence and practice, starting with my second Gotham Writers workshop this fall. I expect this dynamic relationship between myself and fiction writing to be much like the man and woman’s in Dorothy Parker’s “Here We Are”; a back and forth of frustrations and misunderstandings on one hand, and harmony and love on the other. Right now, though, I can only say ‘Here I Am’, as I seek and await degree status.

If you didn’t guess it already, this was my Statement of Purpose that I submitted to Johns Hopkins University. I remember working ferociously on it when I got back to the city.

But I also remember sitting in a home in Upstate NY all by myself during the peak of the pandemic and attempting to write my first ever fiction story. It was terrible, but it provided me with something I had lost. Focus. It felt so good. I sat on the floor of an empty, half constructed house in the middle of the woods with no city noise and no phone to distract me as I had shut it off and left it at my mom’s house every day.

I lost myself in the writing, even if it was rudimentary and amateur at best. When I wrote, nothing else existed and for the first time in years, in my head I heard what I hear now. The silence. I was hooked. I began reading a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport and everything that he said in it had been consistent with how I was feeling.

I practiced an exercise he had for being able to fall into a state of deep focus, which was memorizing an entire deck of cards and I did that enough times to fall in the love with the idea of focus. I had lost my way years prior and the onset of Covid, being stuck at home with only a phone and social media in a city devastated by the pandemic exacerbated every aspect of the corrupted mindset that was tearing me apart from within.

I immediately deactivated my Instagram account and kept it that way for over two years. Some time later I watched the documentary on Netflix, The Social Dilemma. It confirmed what I had not known but felt, and I felt validated because of it.

So, why am I sharing all of this now? Because now I feel like my mind has been reconstructed into some kind of whole again. I have taken back control of it. Through several years of going into myself and losing myself and trying any method I could to regain what I once had before the invention of the Smartphone and Social Media.

Since that one moment burned into my memory when I was told “You should write a book about that,” I haven’t lost the vision. Keep your aspirations in sight. Keep poking your head up and over the obstacle in front of you or around the corner to see that goal in the distance. Once you lose sight of it, it’s hard to find it again. Mine is still ahead but I’ve gained ground. The only obstacle left is me. Me versus me.

But I also know that when I reach that thing that has kept me moving forward this whole time, it’s not the end of the road. It’s just a smaller peak, a false summit that at the very least allows you to see the next peak in the distance. And so the journey will go on…

Food for thought:

Can you get into a state of deep focus?

Do you remember your state of mind now vs. before the smartphone and social media? Is it different?

Did you skim this blog or read it carefully, or even finish it?