...Let the Countdown Begin

The first of June. Summer has long since started, but what remains of it? Actually, probably the best parts. I depart for adventure in nine days, and I cannot even begin to explain how I feel. I'm excited, I'm terrified, I'm eager, I'm anxious. I haven't felt all of these emotions at once since... probably not since I left for college the first time, although if true confessions are to be given, and, honestly, what a better place for true confessions than this painfully public venue of the internet, the end of last summer actually left me feeling terrible. Last summer, with its emotional distress and academic duress almost killed me (emphasis added not to display any literal sense but rather to serve as reference to outside material- this will be constant throughout), but thanks to some great friends and some wonderful music (talking about you Craig Finn- your music reached me unlike any ever had before) I found myself surprisingly not ready to leave what I'd built throughout the summer. I'd entered it shattered, and I remained skeptical that my patchwork job could last, that the positivity I strove for so badly could continue to remain in the face of everything the world had to throw at me. I feel like it did- not that this year was perfect. It had its struggles, but that is what we live for. Today I started reading Schopenhauer's On the Suffering of the World, and in it he claims that suffering is the most basic way in which we experience the world. Happiness and a good life then are merely the absence of suffering. Not sure where I'm at with this yet.

It seems he may be perhaps making a strong point that the world is suffering (very similar to the first noble truth of Buddhism), but I'm not sure that leads to the conclusions he wishes it to. Granted, I haven't come anywhere near completion nor understanding, but I do agree that the world seems to be filled with suffering, and I may even grant that the world is suffering, but where does that leave us? How are we to deal? His answer that we should live our lives in constant atonement for the sin of existence, for the great evil that is our very existence in its disturbance of the most holy nothingness, that... seems lacking, so for now, I'll turn that grey volume nob just a little more to the left and let the waves drift over me....

...This shouldn't hurt, you might just feel a slight discomfort...