Much stronger than the crab.
People say that time heals everything. But supposing time doesn’t mean anything to you? Then what good is it at healing? Well, but it’s not really the time that heals, it’s just time allows you to forget. But what if you can’t forget? Well, then it’s going to be with you always.
I’d mentioned throughout Season 1 the lessons I learned from Japan and tried to take with me into Taiwan. The main one being that I couldn’t be passive about my happiness. I had to decide how things were going to be. This, perhaps obviously, goes beyond just coping with living in different cultures, but relates to many things in life. But I’m also finding some limitations in simply deciding how things are going to be.
It’s generally accepted that passiveness is easy to fall into. It really takes no effort. Don’t make conscience decisions. Let other people make decisions for you. Don’t try to change things. Just let them stay the way they are…or let them change by themselves. Passiveness is the lowest energy state.
So if that’s true, it should also be true that to fight or prevent passiveness takes effort. You have to make conscience decisions. You have to try to change things and not accept the way they are. And so, it takes energy.
I’m not sure what the antithesis of passiveness is called, but using my handy MS Word thesaurus, “proactive” seems the best choice, but it sounds like I’m talking about something completely different. I guess other terms are “upbeat” or “positive”. Those seem better.
Anyway, passiveness and, um, upbeatedness can be applicable for our actions and/or how we view things in life (or attitude). And I mainly mentioned them with regard to attitude. Like with Taiwan. I went there, excited about how things were going to be. But then, they weren’t the way I thought they’d be.
Well, I won’t go into all this again, but basically, I decided how the experience was going to be. You know, changed my attitude. I don’t know if it’s momentum from the experience in Taiwan, or if I’ve been thinking this way for a while, but in any case, I’m finding passiveness harder to accept than to fight. I don’t think I was ever good at just accepting things the way they were.
But here’s the thing. I’m now seeing a difference between being passive and accepting the way things are. They’re closely related, but different. The difference is in attitude. Deciding how things are going to be depends on your attitude. Accepting things the way they are doesn’t. You can have any attitude with that, positive, negative, or neutral.
So then, the options become changing the way things are (proactive action), accepting the way things are (passiveness, independent of attitude), and deciding how to look at the way things are when you can’t change things (proactive attitude).
But what if there is a more grounding truth? Something that is true no matter how you “decide” to look at it? And you can’t change it… All that’s left is to accept it. But as a person who is generally against accepting things as they are, well, this becomes a predicament.
There’s a huge rock in the sand. At first, I think I can move it. But that doesn’t work. So I try to look at it another way. But I can’t deny what is there. So I try to move it again. No use. Knowing my nature, my persistence and patience, it’s possible I could try again, if it was important enough. But what if it doesn’t want to be moved?
…
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