Guessay: Effort and Breakthrough

Escapism is a brief gimmick

In 2023, I tried to read the book Godel, Escher, Bach. I hit a wall about a third of the way in. One of many walls I hit in 2023. The book remains unfinished, another project to throw myself against in 2024.

I started reading the book after watching the musical A Strange Loop, finding myself drawn in by the themes of complexity and contradiction in the art of self-reference.

Reading GEB was one of many things I tried to do in 2023. One effort after another. Dashed against the walls that encase all the open and closed rooms we may someday access in the story of our own life, rooms of ourselves. I guess the real story though, is that I tried, like I do every year, to escape myself.

The process of escaping yourself. It’s just a process. I felt, at one point, during a hyper-oxygenated breathing exercise, as if I’d blown a hole in wall of the prison of the self. That was the magic of my first experience with Vivation breathwork. A seed of renewal planted. I stepped out of and away from the walls I had constructed into a new and more vibrant reality than what came before. It lasted a day. A week. The rest of my life.

As it turns out, blasting all your mental prisons and outdated modes of thinking to smithereens through new age breathwork and rebirthing exercises only clears the *path* to freedom. Actually walking on this path post-emancipation requires something different. Grit. Enthusiasm for setting obstacles alight. Willingness to stumble occasionally (we escape from the monotony of repetition and comfort into a toddler-like state of newness and clumsiness, trading competency and complacency for a second chance at life).

As we step out into the sunshine, whether we walk, crawl or run toward our final destination is not always ours to decide.

Faith in oneself offers no map, only a compass. A leap of faith is no guarantee against a fall into the depths.

Life is open ended. Days come and go. Truth has no arbiter aside from you or I. This essay simply words on a page. Bits into the ether. You can make it as true or false as you want.

What did I learn, if anything, in 2023?

I learned that life is not a story about what’s going to happen tomorrow. Every day we meet the world, we meet the world that day.

I’m trying to make it all count, so I wrote a bunch of resolutions for 2024. Basic stuff. Like surrendering to life - not trying to control the outcome - letting the chips fall where they may. Other ones like appreciating the beauty in all things. Practicing kindness with all conscious beings. Etcetera.

I learned that sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good, but that even then, less than perfect may still not be good enough.

Some tricks may require a stuck landing. Sometimes you can trick yourself into a feeling of stuckness.

Anyhow, art, I guess, is about throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. And life is about throwing yourself at the wall in hopes of one day breaking through it. Life imitates art and art imitates life. Every day is an invitation to try again.

And writing is about having a pen in your hand when inspiration strikes. That’s why I’m also committing to writing more in 2024. I don’t know yet know what I’ll have to say, but I know that I’ll have to say it.

I don’t really know if this essay works, but I’m at least glad I tried. There’s something that I’m trying to say here. I don’t know if the message is coming across. But I’ll try again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. And all the days and days that the sun rises until I run out of chances.