Jul 7, 2021
Living in the Lens
What and how we choose to magnify the matters of our lives becomes the way we live them.
It seems to me that the most common modality unconsciously played-out and simultaneously desired by those struggling in life is an imbalance between the distance, consistency, and subject matter with which one holds their magnifying glass. How far away should you stand when approaching the problems in your life — how close should you allow yourself to get to the problems of others? What matters the most — what are the significant subjects that you should focus on in the first place? What pieces of your life deserve to be magnified?
The Exclusion Zone
On April 26th, 1986, scientists at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant ran a nuclear safety test that would result in the explosion of the №4 Nuclear Reactor. The outcome was considered to be one of the worst man-made disasters in history. In the aftermath, an area was marked in a 19-mile radius around the site of the explosion known simply as The Exclusion Zone. Inside this wasteland, the effects of radioactive particles become too severe and dangerous to allow for habitation, starkly proven when historical accounts about the local wildlife are taken into consideration. In the years following the disaster, many animals were born with deformities, missing limbs, diseases, and many died very early deaths due to the failure of their organs — a result from intense radiation poisoning. To this day, there is a high amount of radiation that leaks from Chernobyl — and that’s not going to change any time soon.
When we consider the idea of radiation — the way it breaks down cells, causes them to act erratically, poisoning their core, and ultimately, betraying your body to a slow and painful death — the first question has to be: how can I avoid this? What measures can be taken to ensure I do not meet this end? Doubtless these were the questions that scientists, firefighters, and clean-up crewmen asked themselves countless times after seeing their friends and family succumb to the radioactive demise. These questions, in their very nature, transcend specific circumstances, pointing to a bigger theme within humanity itself. How do I make it so I end up more like that person? How do I avoid falling into the same traps that they fell into? This inquisition is fundamental, even absolutely critical, to the successful functioning of our species.
We are constantly inquiring, whether we are aware of it or not. When we see the homeless man, we consider his position, but we know, and have always known, that we don’t want to end up under the same circumstances. Ingrained in our very soul is the underlying desire to rise from the ashes, to learn from our mistakes, and crucially, the mistakes of others as well. Failure is a wretched feeling, but from failure is born the chance to change. So we analyze the defeat and triumph of those around us and employ key tactics that are found to be universally formidable. The scientist puts on a gas mask, lead plating, and brings a Geiger counter into the deep, dark, radiated wreckage.
What if he didn’t? What if he was to approach the fabled Elephant’s Foot without his protective shielding? Any way you look at it, journeying into such a dangerous place is never going to leave you unscathed. Radioactive thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors plague many of our lives, to a varying degree. They act as our very own Elephant Feet — highly concentrated pockets of dangerous and destructive mental and physical habits, nestled deep in the camouflaged recesses of our psyche, awaiting intricate exploration. Subtle judgements, explosions of anger, unexplained sadness, aimlessness, a lack of meaning, unmitigated pity, false virtue — toxic material that manages to slip its way into our minds and behaviors, even more so if we are not hyper-aware of our magnifying distance to sources of such radiation.
The closer we stand to our lives, or the more micro-level analysis we perform, the more discontent we will be with what we find. That is to say, as we continue to zoom further and further in on the minor matters of our existence, we start losing the importance of the bigger picture. This is an incredibly dangerous modality to fall into, because it can only lead to one reaction: ultra magnification, ultra self-world-ignorance! Minor matters that were once, and most likely should still be, minor, are now the things living your life for you.
This isn’t to say that zooming in, using micro-analysis, is evil, always to be avoided. Not at all. The ability we have to change our optics, to decide what level of analysis to apply to any given stimulus — that is a powerful tool. Being capable of magnifying items that need magnifying adds incredible value to your life, allowing you to enact real change in the first place. However, it is when we implement this zooming tactic into our daily lives, into every average moment, that leaves us feeling depressed, anxious, volatile and scattered.
Taking a step back is often accompanied by a beautiful breath of fresh air, a dose of important perspective, and a temporal break from what was consuming you. It becomes increasingly crucial that we learn how to effectively implement our macro-to-micro-to-macro analysis abilities. After the disaster at Chernobyl, scientists were called in, forced to brave their own lives for the future and hope of all life and the well-being of the earth. They had to knowingly enter The Exclusion Zone, closing their distance to the dangers of intense radioactivity. But they were prepared to see their Elephant Feet — or at least as prepared as one could be, given the circumstances. They knew they would not come out unscathed, they knew this important work would take some part of them, but that was a manageable risk given what was at stake.
Today, and always, everything is at stake. Your very soul, your brain space, your attention, your love, your willingness, your understanding. Every part of you is at stake, open to the radioactive dust and rain that will tarnish your mind, making it harder to refocus your perspective. It is our great mission as mortal beings to increase our ability, widen our view, and learn how far is too far and how close is too close to stand when going to work on oneself.
The Glacial Summit
I am completely convinced that the hardest human feature to master is behavioral consistency. Forget mastering it — even attempting to reach apprentice or journeyman levels of consistency is incredibly difficult. There is no part of the consistency puzzle that you can cheat. It’s a thousand-piece puzzle made of carbon-steel. There’s no bending the chunks to fit better, there’s no cutting a corner off one part to slide it in another section on the other side. There’s no jimmy-rigging any part of consistency — it’s petrified elements always stapled-strong to the human condition. And we get little reminders of this every single day. Isn’t that fun?
Consistency might be an insurmountable glacier, and to you, it might not be worth climbing. To me, there are times when I’d rather roll over, draw my curtains, and ignorantly stumble back into a half-baked sleep. Try doing that a couple hundred times and you’ll lose sight of the glacier all together, probably getting offended when people talk about the icy monstrosity and their attempts to break it’s summit. But the summit sits up there all the same, utterly and wholly indifferent to your opinion about it.
You’re gonna slip on your climb up consistency mountain — after all, the surface is sheathed in permafrost. You will slip, and you’ll rip up your legs, leaving blood smears up and down the pearly-white surface. The blood will freeze, too, and when you come passing by on your next attempt, you might learn something from those crimson stains. They might show you the way not to go. So you’ll keep climbing all the same, and you’ll slip again. And again. And your blood will run hot, and you’ll pound your balled-up fingers into the jagged snow, drawing sinew and bone from your knuckled fists. But hopefully, if you’ve learned anything, you’ll keep climbing, all the same.
You might have been ascending for days, months, or even years, skin so shredded and torn that it’s skeleton fingers hoisting your beat and broken body up the sheer. Your harrowed eyes bent so close to the glacial front, that’s all you can see. But you’re climbing all the same, and so long as you climb, you’re better off for it.
Then one day, you’ll look up into the twilight ether, and you’ll see that there was never just one glacial summit to top. Hundreds, thousands of prudent behaviors to master so far as the eye can see. It’s beautiful. It’s damned terrifying. It’s completely exhausting — so why continue the climb at all? If one rise gives way into another and then another after that, why not just stop, dig a snowy little cave, light a fire and rest here for the remainder of your days?
You’re gonna freeze to death, that’s why. And good luck finding kindling for your fire on the side of a glacier. Some people like freezing to death, or so they say. They like staking out a little corner of the world, plopping their ass into the frozen tundra, and exclaiming, “Get me a margarita, and I’m set for life!” These words spill from a million frozen mouths, colored in audio tones that make the listeners and speakers believe it through and through. But then they freeze to death and wonder why it’s so hot outside.
Whether you want to believe it or not, you are always climbing a consistency mountain. Your habits, your daily inclinations, your addictions, your behaviors, the ones that you act out every day — they are hills, cliffs, and glaciers of their own, and they’ll make or break you. Mindless, accidental, negative consistency bleeds you so dry that your husk cracks and blows away into the wind. How often are you sinking your feet into freezing habits and wondering why you can’t make another step? How often are you crawling and scraping up piles and piles of pernicious tendency, swimming around in radioactive filth? You’re climbing something, best make sure it’s something worth climbing.
You’re a Bleedin’ Mess
You are not perfect the way you are — whoever convinced you of that should be drawn and quartered. You’re somewhat of a mess. I am. We can be messy together. At some point, we took a fork in the road that was easy, not right, when it comes to the language we use to describe ourselves. We started telling people how perfect they are, how gorgeously, magnificently perfect they all are. We started dancing around campfires with strangers, singing kumbaya, laughing and cackling like hyenas, as if this moment would last an eternity. As if this slice of time was how everyone holding hands always was. Warm smiles, dog-faced-filters, hearts-on-my-eyes glitter and glam. So perfect, so exactly how it should be.
You are not perfect the way you are — and I hate to be the one to tell you that you never will be. But I love to be the one to tell you that’s okay. Now, what you just read was I am perfectly imperfect and my imperfection is what makes me perfect, so I’m still perfect. Once again, break out the horses and draw-and-quarter that thought into oblivion. It isn’t your imperfection that makes you perfect, it’s your imperfection that makes you human. The sooner you stop glorifying all your shitty faults, the sooner you can get to work on improving them.
Our shortcomings, laze-induced habits, failures, negative consistencies — these have all been made false idols for far too long. Worshipped like golden calves, donated to like glorious charity, we dance around them as they become the things living our lives, and not us. We started to believe that having an opinion about every part of ourselves, and everyone else, was actually necessary. We started letting these opinions be the driving force behind the change we desired for our lives. We stopped measuring our guts to find objective truths for our bodies, and started claiming everything as subjective because it was easy and felt good.
So now we sit, fat and plump, believing that Diet Coke is good for us while knowing that it isn’t. We happily procrastinate another day, another month, another year, all in the sake of motivation. All for the sake of our feelings. All because tomorrow we’ll be ready for today. Meanwhile we soak in rusted vats of radiation-goo and climb blood-stained glaciers so red and gory, we can’t bust our pick’s through to the ice. And somewhere in all of that shit, we still have the gall to call ourselves perfect.
You are not perfect the way you are — and every time you draw out your magnifying glass and aggrandize your bleeding heart, you make it bleed a little more. You have an amplifying tool to understand the atoms of your life. You have consistency, action, and guts to guide you. It’s time to stop marinating in that which makes you feel good, and start climbing that which makes you whole.
