Salvador Dali wrote, “Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy-the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?”
Sometimes when I dream, they are so inexplicably detailed, vivid, and disturbingly beautiful, that I must believe in God, or in some other dimension I am visiting, because I can not take credit for all of what I see. I wonder if you feel the same way about where you go, what you see, and what you do in your dreams.
Thursday night I was pretty tired. And I started drafting a blog post, and aside from being a bit too uncomfortable to follow through with writing, due to working all week, – yes, a big accomplishment for me – I got a feeling that I didn’t have anything important to say. And to write, would be in the vein of just polluting the world, rather than enjoying the spaces between the words. Also known as silence.
But my walk home on Friday was profound. I have been meditating 30 minutes in the morning (yes, before work) and 30 minutes at night, and, more importantly, spending a little bit of time each day in nature.
I think that being in nature is a state of mind. People always say there isn’t enough nature in Chicago. Have you looked up? I used to always look at the ground when I walked, in a hurry to get to where I was going. But now, I must’ve practiced walking enough that it can, or should be, a leisurely activity.
So on my walk home, I noticed the profound beauty of the trees, the greens, the smells, the earth, unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Well, once before, when a tree started dancing in front of me, but that is a different story.
You don’t need drugs to recognize the great beauty of the world. You don’t need to live in some forest village, or in a rural area, I think, you just have to look up from your feet, walk slowly, and listen to what you see.
Nature has an interesting form of communication, and so do cities. But the less I try and emphasize what I think things mean, or how I should respond, the more heavenly it all is. This goes for talking with people, too.
However, the less I try to do with my day, the more I end up accomplishing in the long run. I think it is because I tire less easily.
The bad news is, my Friday nights are “my night off,” so I spent the rest of it in a slumberous oblivion, until 11 the next morning. Therapy arrived at 2:30, and hmph, it was difficult (Which is a good thing).
I’ve blamed my father for a lot of the reasons for why I am the way I am and where I am at in life – because the relationship is more proximate to my daily life. Now, my therapist and I are juuuusssttt beginning to unpack my mom stuff, which, what he says, is a little bit less accessible, but might actually have more sway over my conception than I realize.
It’s important not to overidealize her.
And then we landed on everybody’s favorite topic: Love.
And it wasn’t fun to go through all the terrible ways I treated every girl I was in love with. It really wasn’t. And between you and me, when I think about it, I really feel like cutting my throat, but that’s not fair. In the spirit of Sisyphus, I think having to live, is my just punishment.
It’s wonderful that life is so beautiful, I’m sure you are glad to hear. But it’s not a good life, one of virtue. I think I once wrote that beauty does not always indicate good character. And it’s not that too much beauty has made me sour. It is that I have found it through such evils.
I always say, “Ya know, solving all of my problems, doesn’t really justify what I did to you.” It’s great that life is great over here, but, even if I live to a hundred, die sober, and am forgiven, it really all is in sort of vain.
But sometimes, a little bit of vanity isn’t wrong. Ya know, my mom died. And I’ve let some of that stuff go, just like I’ve let a big chunk of what my dad did go. And those are good things to let go.
But there are still some things I hold onto. I don’t care if they make me look foolish, or result in me being single forever, or I don’t know, hold me back in my career. There are certain things I’m going to keep, because even though they drive me crazy, they are too beautiful.
And meaningful enough to justify my life.
-Sisyphus Dali
Ben Bonkoske 