“And there were just a lot of days when you woke up and
you just wish that at the end of the day, you hadn’t
Because you haven’t done anything that hasn’t just been a trial”
The opening lines from my favourite song, Emily by Tourist strikes me with a powerful message that resonates with my own existence. Emily is one of those songs able to arouse a range of emotions through series of melancholic loops and uplifting progressive beats that put listeners into a trance-like state onto experience a magical transformation. Emily brings me on a journey to a strange mediocre place in the middle, just repeated trials without conviction. It’s a “I wished today I had burned with passion instead of being in a grey zone”. We always expected that we should accomplish more. If I was sad, I wished I was very sad, so I could do something about it. If I was happy, I wished I was ecstatic, so I could indulge in something with purpose. It is not the 80/20 rule, but rather to touch something with 100% of your heart. I wished I could fall in love with the same thing, task or person over and over again and the initial burst of energy would never fade. Like photographs capturing images, if there is a way to hold onto feelings better than our faulty memories and to re-experience them with the same intensity — the smell of the first spring shower, the discovery of good music for the first time, the excited fear when learning to bike, the clarity from solving a hard problem, the bliss when finding out the person you like feels the same way. When the biological trait that helps us survive works against us — blame adaptation for robbing away that vibrant feeling of freshness. Conflictingly I enjoy the comfort within predictability. I can expect to have a place to live tomorrow, instead of winding up on the streets. But once something becomes predictable, it is no longer stimulating and it bores me. Is it possible to find something I would commit a lifetime to with the same eagerness from the first day? In most cases, a magical transformation happens, felt in long-term relationships, the will of a professional athlete as they move on to experience commitment, attachment, and identity. That is Emily, watching your passion convert into comfort, and appreciating the beauty in that. In an ideal world, I’d have infinite time, energy and resources to devote to everything. In real life, trade off is inevitable and is present in every aspect of our lives. We are to be passionate but not overzealous, to appreciate everything we have yet be driven to do better, to stand by our beliefs with an open mind, to master something but maintain a child-like curiosity. Some people like me struggle to identify that middle ground called balance and even if we find it, it’s challenging to be content with the middle ground. That too is Emily, a happy trade off. It’s the process of stumbling into no man’s land by nature’s force and embracing it rather than fighting it. It’s realizing you can no longer see the world in intense black or white, but a complex depth of grey. It is apologetically maturity.
I find the older I get, the harder it is to make decisions. A kid picking between A and B will go with the first letter that comes to mind. These days it’s hard to decide A without doing a detailed analysis on A and B, developing a future projection and running it under multiple scenarios with estimated probabilities. Everything I look into leads into endless information that refuses to give way to a final decision under bounded rationality. It’s the fear of negative consequences and caring too much about getting it right. Ironically I desire the freedom to do what I want, the flexibility of options, and the act of making an impact, at least the very idea of it. But a deeper part of me does not want to make decisions ever due to its unescapable accountability. We find comfort and relief in things that are beyond our control, that we can attribute to luck, randomness, higher authority, supernatural force, which ultimately takes away the pressure from ourselves. The moment you take matters into your own hands, your actions have irreversible effects on your future and horrifyingly the futures of others. Once a decision involves more than yourself, it becomes complicated as your miscalculations could create negative consequences on other people. Many situations have no right or wrong, certainties, nor are there clear solutions. Forget impact, if you are a complicated human like me, at times I prefer to be in a corner and not interact with the world because it’s difficult to hold everything that your heart touches lightly.
