Themes and Variations on Waking Up

Hello all. I am called ryan. I enjoy building fires on beaches and san serif fonts, so it really bothers me that Helvetica is not an option here at blogger. I used to blog at http://greatintheory.wordpress.com/ but I eventually deleted every post, as I have a particularly bad habit of doing (ask the torn bindings of my moleskine).

I am glad to be here at The Tortoise Initiative; I consider this domain a blank slate limited only by my fear of the blinking black line in the top left corner of the screen. The idealist in me always harbors that hope that all we (the editorial "we") need is one more fresh start, one more creative space to start over and reinvent. As naive as that may sound spoken aloud, we all have a tendency to inwardly believe something similar at certain times.

At the diner, the rising sun will send rays of light haphazardly leaping through the windows, cutting through the steam rising from your mug, and whatever you say during that moment is vigorous and youthful and awake. That is a redemptive feeling. There is a confidence and a forgiveness that comes with letting go, no not forgetting, letting go of failures, victories, preconceived notions of what you are capable of, labels and loss. Everyone has experienced the terror and beauty of waking up in an unfamiliar place. Everyone secretly wishes they could brush their teeth, walk outside and announce that "today, the rules are: there are no rules".

Alas, in the interest of intellectual honesty, we must consider the converse. We must do what is hard and weigh the benefits of the past against the freedom of the untethered life. For there are benefits, I must admit. Momentum can only be realized through an awareness of your own personal history, and truthfully the excitement of waking up at a stranger's place is the fuzzy pre-dawn question "am I home?".

Where do I fall on the issue? Is there wisdom in whole-heartedly embracing the new day, the spring, or are we losing something by forgetting the lessons we learned in winter? Here at the Tortoise I will attempt to do what I have never done previously: Create and not forget. I will not rip the pages out, even if looking back over the clumsy words and fuzzy logic, I see little worth saving. One can still feel the excitement of the pen on paper even if there are pages and pages of rough coffee-stained words to the left.

I like how one of my favorite navel-gazers Søren Kierkagaard puts it:

Nature, at its most basic level, is ahistorical, in that it can only be predicated of history in one way: it has come into being. A smaller subset of nature, potentiality, can be more fully predicated of history.

Potentiality is the thread that ties our past and our future together. There is only what has been, what could be and the vaporous sliver of time called the present where we sift through the latter and fall into the former. When I look at it this way, the sharp distinction between past and present blurs the slightest bit, and I see more clearly that decision is what lies behind them. Every new post could be a million things, and every old post could have been a million things. Accept, maybe even rejoice, in your history, live out your future. Do not delete, do not give up.

I love this song, and I think the video, in a way, expresses what we all value about spring, and new beginnings, but has a reflective ending that kind of blurs those type of distinctions.

*Must be watched in full screen mode

White Winter Hymnal from Grandchildren on Vimeo.

So there it is, my first post. Maybe you read it and liked it, maybe you read it and hated it. Maybe by morning I will think myself foolish, or preachy or any number of things, but regardless, this time I won't tear out the page.