Author: Christiaan van Gaal

Day 2657, Only your past knows the truth about your past.

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Your self-image is partly formed by your past and what you remember, consciously or not. You probably have been in a situation like this: you get greeted by your classmates at a reunion with welcome cheers and fond memories; you might feel confused if you have lived all those years with the memory that you were a loner at that school and making friends was difficult for you. Why do you remember certain situations from the past differently than others do?

We have many memories and feelings about past events that we can never verify. Consequently, we can never be sure of what our “self” is or who we are because thinking of yourself as a loner instead of a more popular kid in the classroom might greatly affect your self-image. Despite this, most of what we remember and feel as a part of our self-image is probably true. However, it is hard to determine which parts; this might be a source of our insecurities about who we are.

We also add new memories every moment we live; they might not immediately affect your “self.” but some of them can have significant effects in the future without you realizing it. In this constant stream of input, finding the source of new and important events might be difficult when looking back, overwhelmed as we are by our senses. Your memories might feel focused at a certain time in the past when you remember them, but the reality is often that these memories are a collage of miner events put together later to fit your current self-image. We not only have a hard time locating the source of our memories at a later date, but we also play a part in their construction after the fact, and both of them are in constant motion.

We often feel our self, but many of us are also looking for our self. We often hold on to a self and let our inner workings or unconsciousness maintain that image of our self(s) through subtle manipulation. No matter what is happening, your self is constantly in motion, going nowhere but always becoming.

Gilles Deleuze has written about the self in his work; underneath, you can read some quotes. There is also a famous study about memories of the 9/11 attack that highlights the problems we have with memories; read it here: https://news.lafayette.edu/2021/09/07/remembering-9-11-are-flashbulb-memories-accurate-20-years-later/ or do a search for it.

  “The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.”

“To affirm is not to bear, carry, or harness oneself to that which exists, but on the contrary to unburden, unharness, and set free that which lives.”

“Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.”

Gilles Deleuze

Day 2656, Windows of opportunity.

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Life is unfair. Why do I say that? Because we are free and unfree at the same time.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre takes our freedom to the extreme in that we can take our own life and end it at any moment. We are condemned to find a reason to live and not take the final step, and this finding of a reason is the meaning you give to your life.

If you are not satisfied with parts of your life, let’s say your work becomes meaningless to you, you can repeat to yourself all the reasons why you should keep this job, like feeding your family and paying the mortgage. These reasons are all valid for your particular life, but you as a human being can just stand up after lunch, walk away, and don’t stop walking till you are far away from your life, literally. We don’t do this because of moral reasons, society and responsibilities, but the fact that we can do it makes this tension between our freedom and unfreedom so interesting.

A second problem is that there is no general reason for life or to keep on living besides the fact that we do. Our basic instincts functions like eating and breathing extend our life till its natural end without much effort on our part. You can believe in some sort of god or afterlife, but that is not more than a personal reason to live for and not one that is grounded in what we know, the facts.

We humans, thinking animals, have, through our living together, invented all kinds of reasons why we live, and we have written books full of rules that tell us what to do and what not to do. We all know this, even if you can’t read or end up in a society that is alien to you, you know that there are rules, and you try to follow them. We are conditioned to follow these written and unwritten rules, but none of these rules relate to any facts about life. The only rule with any basis in facts is that we can ignore all these man-made rules and regulations. We can ignore a red light at a crossroad; no one stops you the next time you approach this symbol that forbids… you are free to make a choice.

All these rules are, of course, necessary to let our society function, but like Sartre said, we are ultimately free to stand up and go our own way, we are condemned to be free.

“My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop. I exist because I think… and I can’t stop myself from thinking. At this very moment – it’s frightful – if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

Day 2652, thus.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus spoke Zarathustra
Zarathustra’s Speeches/On the three metamorphoses

Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.

There is much that is difficult for the spirit, the strong reverent spirit that would bear much: but the difficult and the most difficult are what its strength demands.  What is difficult? asks the spirit that would bear much, and kneels down like a camel wanting to be well loaded. What is most difficult, 0 heroes, asks the spirit that would bear much, that I may take it upon myself and exult in my strength? Is it not humbling oneself to wound one’s haughtiness? Letting one’s folly shine to mock one’s wisdom?

Or is it this: parting from our cause when it triumphs? Climbing high mountains to tempt the tempter?

Or is it this: feeding on the acorns and grass of knowledge and, for the sake of the truth, suffering hunger in one’s soul?

Or is it this: being sick and sending home the comforters and making friends with the deaf, who never hear what you want?

Or is it this: stepping into filthy waters when they are the waters of truth, and not repulsing cold frogs and hot toads?

Or is it this: loving those who despise us and offering a hand to the ghost that would frighten us?

All these most difficult things the spirit that would bear much takes upon itself: like the camel that, burdened, speeds into the desert, thus the spirit speeds into its desert.

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Day 2651, the time when.

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It is hard to make decisions in a world, or better said, a universe that doesn’t care about you, that has no plan or conscious direction. Do I move here or there, and shall I take that job? These questions matter to you and maybe some people around you, but none of the people you meet on the street that day are thinking about your choices. It is personal to you, and your choice will only make a small wrinkle around you that no one further away from you will notice.   

Your choice is trivial in the greater scheme of things and, in that sense, also for your life. Yes, moving to another city will change your life, but the factual choice to go, yes or no, is meaningless because either way, your life goes on, and only your opinion of that life matters; almost no one else cares remember. You can, and probably will, make sense of either choice, and when it turns out to be a bad choice, well… this might put more pressure on your next choice. Still, the fact is also that you never will know how life would have gone if you made the other choice; in this case, you can only compare your so-called bad direction with an imaginary other direction.

There are no objectively good decisions in life because there are no written rules or blueprints of how life should be. It’s probably best to throw dice or tap into your memories and feel how it was when you were eight and wandered around attracted by directions you didn’t even know were there, the time when the directions made the decisions.

Day 2650, behind the curtains.

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The idea of a crossroad where I sit down, waiting for a clue, is something I came up with yesterday while sitting down to write something. Today I looked around at the world and the people I met and wondered: do they ever think about their life in metaphors. I don’t get the impression that they do due to how they answer my probing questions and react to my remarks. But they might have their own reasons to hide that part of their life from me and maybe the rest of the world. Perhaps this is due to their character, life experience, or just my faulty interpretation.

I rarely ask someone directly what they think of me and my ideas. It might be me, but that is not something we do in the society I live in. Only children, drunkards, or otherwise intoxicated people seem to ask these kinds of direct questions.

I wish I could be a kid again and ask the people in the store if they ever sit at a crossroad in life, waiting for an answer. Why and when do we change from being a child, full of wonder and little shame, into these buttoned-up so-called grownups with our wonder tamed and locked inside behind the curtains.  

Day 2649, choices.

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For the last twenty-five years, I have been at a crossroad. After a while, I realized I better sit down, realizing it would be a long wait. It took even longer to learn where the different roads would lead to but to be honest, I am still not sure.

Somewhere during that time, I wrote down that I was pretty lucky. I at least realized there was a crossroad where I was; so many people only find this out when they are a long way in one or another direction. Looking back, they only see the decisions they could have made, waving at me from a distance. But maybe there is something to say for hindsight instead of unclear foresight. I let life decide a lot of directions; I am pretty sure I even believe that I choose most of them willingly and freely; they are mostly related to the mundane parts of life, like where to live and what job to take to pay the bills. The crossroad I am sitting on, waiting, decides the direction…it determines how you deal with your own consciousness in a corrupt(ting) society and maybe even a corrupt human nature.

Many people pass me where I sit and tell me that they know that there is nothing to know, and they go on to live for their own till an empty end where they take their contradictions with them into their oblivion. Others are certain of the direction to take, joining all the others on that path as individuals in a traffic jam. The certainty that leads you on this path is the other side of the first one; they both have the same value, but only for the believer.

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Day 2644, protection.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond good and evil
Our virtues

226 We immoralists! – This world as it concerns us, in which we need to love and be afraid, this almost invisible, inaudible world of subtle command, subtle obedience, a world of the “almost” in every respect, twisted, tricky, barbed, and loving: yes, it is well defended against clumsy spectators and friendly curiosity! We have been woven into a strong net and shirt of duties, and cannot get out of it –, in this sense we are “people of duty,” – even us! It is true that we sometimes dance quite well in our “chains” and between our “swords”; it is no less true that more often we grind our teeth and feel impatient at all the secret harshness of our fate. But we can do as we please: fools and appearances will speak up against us, claiming “those are people without duties” – fools and appearances are always against us