Opinions are an ease by which any society creates and maintains standards. Those standards are applicable to a portion of the society, rarely all. Simple opinion, take Uggs : you may not have one as you don't wear any. You may be an avid advocate of theirs. You may not like their product yet remain silent, you evoke a sense of neutrality or indifference. The issue isn't our opinions, rather how we communicate them. The issue is we can't have an unbiased discussion, everything we do is related to a thought, a feeling, a want, a need we've carried our entire lives. Say you make a decision about your life based on the opinions or advice of others it invites a feeling of uneasiness if the decision was bad. Even if it was good, if you were opposed to it in the beginning it still feels foreign. The decision not being your own leaves a bad taste in your mouth. In part opinions have become part of our identity. Opinions were an ease by which society created and maintained standards. Opinions are now armor and weapons used during an argument. Next time you argue with someone, note how you feel after. You will see the range from winning or losing the argument will fluctuate with external factors ( did anyone raise their voice, did anyone cry, was anyone offended or offensive). The best way to win an argument is not to have the right opinion. It is to speak clearly about things you understand. Having the facts is well in good, but simply spewing them on the table amounts to very little. It amounts to a messy table where no one wants to eat their dinner. How do most people use their opinions thus? Their use varies deeply depending on culture or the century. Once Humans started thriving on a difference of opinions it became an unstoppable machine. They differed on everything, is the difference to say they are different or are they actually different. A fact I can neither prove nor disprove since it has been embedded into our society as an opinion. If someone had a negative opinion on Uggs, you listing facts from their website would move them very little or not at all, you might in fact reinforce that negative belief. Changing someone's opinion is as hard as getting them to chop off their arm voluntarily. The only real difference between people is what they value vs what they give value to. If you are entitled to believe what you want then so are others, do not leave your armor at home. In a society where we've been literally numbing ourselves for fear of bearing the full weight of human emotions without a chemical buffer now I must also bear your opinion of me. No thank you, literally. The spread of misinformation is rampant and serves as building blocks for argumentative opinions. The little territories our ancestors divvied up claiming independence yet unable to survive without human hyper-connectivity is amusing. The interdependence of nations is as contrary to their independent claims as opinions are from fact.

As a child I was very gullible. When I was seven my mom promised me rum raisin ice cream (our favorite) if I went to church with her. I did not like church, I thought it was weird. The idea that an all-knowing creature required me to be somewhere specific at any given time seemed strange and a lame excuse to make poor people poorer. We went to church that Sunday. I watched the pastor wipe the sweat off his brow as he yelled "God is good" and waited for the congregation to reply "All the time." The thought of ice cream kept me from squirming too much. When it was time to stand for the sermon I could no longer see the pastor clearly. My line of sight was blocked by this lady in front of me, she had a large flowing white hat. She would raise her hand and the hat would ebb every time the pastor stomped his feet. He was adamant that he was a messenger of God and the congregation needed to give back to God to thank him for his blessings. Why did God never want you to keep your money. Money is the root of all evil and God is entirely pure. Only he could sanctify your money, through us of course. Why did we need to give money to the church? Why did we need to pray together? I don't have answers to those questions—none that would satisfy anyway. Much of my time was casually interrupted to provide exaltations to a being that I never received a reply from. I was told to pray when I woke up, I was told to pray before going to bed. We prayed before class started, we prayed after class ended. We went to church on Sundays. My whole being is bothered by the church. In such an unfathomable way that I look back at that child and almost pity him. I do not pity adult Christians, they have made a choice. My heart could ache for every Christian child but then I would give value to hell. The adults are led to believe that a mystical being that is all-knowing and all-powerful placed the pastor here for his purposes. His purposes most often involving guiding the congregation both spiritually and financially. We cannot forget financially. I don't hate church as much as I hate the way it turns fair-minded people into dogmatic believers. I knew this doctor and his family when I was little. They were my neighbors and they were Adventist. The women were not allowed to wear pants. I thought as a child that doctors were educated. What do pants have to do with the will of God? The church did not invent dogma but as our records indicate it has made the best use of it. I'm still waiting for that ice cream.

I did not invent effort. Until recently that concept was not at all familiar to me. Effort here we will take to mean a determined and vigorous attempt. I think effort should not be classified under what people do but what people are. For there to be effort the attempt must be vigorous and determined. Yes, but an attempt can be made to look as such, therefore no effort was made but appropriately simulated. Conscious effort seems to be the default since we are conscious we can drop that word. I think we should add another. Continuous Conscious effort. The bane of my current existence. The act of being not only aware that you are trying therefore exerting effort but also that you will fail. Failure is the greatest teacher no one seems to care about. I was deeply afraid of it. Now I bask in it against my will. I did not choose to fail, I know I must. I know I will, I know it is part of the process. My earlier attachments to the definition of failing have kept me tied up. They have kept me at war with myself over little failures and big ones alike. I am not an expert in failure, I have failed many times however and each time I was harder on myself than I needed to be. This is a classic mind pitfall where what you know and how you know it does not merge. I know I must fail so why be my own enemy when I fail. Systems do not dissolve overnight. My view of failure was systemic. I now make an effort to be less hard on myself. If it was easy and I had it figured out, this would be called I figured it out. Alas. I am better at noticing when the failure was within my control (requires more effort), and when it was not within my control (nothing I could have done to change the outcome). One lets me know where to improve, the other lets me know that I have improved.

I often wonder how much I can take of this panopticon. I wonder too much, even in my mind I slide into cascades of thoughts until they become an avalanche while I am still at the base of the mountain. It is an inexperienced climber that lets the distance between him and the top get to him. The mountain must be climbed however long it must take. Thinking about climbing the mountain does not move our feet, it does not move our heart. It breeds paralysis. Paralysis of thought. When you undertake the future, overlooking the present and succumb to the past. Now, this moment here is the only true moment. It is the only one that exists and all others are imaginary versions of this moment. Some you lament. Some you hope come to pass. Neither does because you are not looking at what is in front of you. You look at what is ahead with complete disregard for what lies beneath you. You look at the past with utter disgust without recognizing that you are no longer there. The present is much harder to see. The present is a present most have said. But what is a present one does not know how to make use of? I'm sure there must be a term for it, I do not know it. Trash? Perhaps, not quite though. A present one does not know the full utility of can become a burden. You may try to figure out all its uses rather than mastering one at a time. We know this. Knowing and avoiding the pitfalls of our mind is a game of battleships. One where we both know where the ships of the opposition rest. The winner then is decidedly who attacks first and the most. Your past self knows you very well, he knows when you are about to fall but rarely saves you. Why? The most common line of reasoning seems to be that it must be protecting you from something. Someone? Yourself? All possibilities yet none come forth at this moment. If it is indeed protecting me from myself what do I seek protection from. A heavy heart is all that weighs on me these days. One where it would eclipse me to not speak of the love it holds. To let it bubble and fester within me as if it was shameful. It has been shameful to love at times. I have been shameful about my love of the self at times. Shame and embarrassment are not unexplored emotions we carry from day to day. They are a living breathing part of our organism. Parts that I should treat with more care. Though they are temporary in reality the mind bends time and space to distort when they become too heavy. Yet it is only with familiarity that we must enable ourselves to recognize that these feelings are not negative they are instructive. The lesson learned from them will last a lifetime. I have attended the classes but I seem to retain none of the information when it truly matters. The mind would sooner drown itself than detach itself from non self-serving identity.

We have looked into the depths of our soul. We have waged war against the void, the darkness the never ending ocean. Know your enemy, spend as much time with them as you would your friends. You learn to embody them, you learn to let them crawl on your skin and overpower you. You learn that you are only as resilient as you believe you are when you are anchor-less. In this world you need an anchor, for many of us it is other people. Child, significant other, I have neither. Sure there are other anchors, pleasure, pain, achievements, recognition. But for most of us it is other people. Those anchors are solid, alive and reciprocal. Those anchors guarantee a sense of safety and purpose. I want to find an anchor that I can rely upon, rather than seeking anchor should I build one? Should I realize that I am already building one. Realize that it is heavy and a burden, that it breaks and breaks me in the process. Realize that the void and the anchor are at war over the foundation of our being. That this process came at my request and now I need to choose not only the anchor, the foundation but the systems in which we will use to advance our goals. Our goals will shift as we align ourselves more with who we are but we must choose with what speed and intensity we will pursue them. We cannot be lackluster, or lackadaisical about this pursuit. We cannot be half in half out, we must embody the pursuit like we embrace the dark. We must let it wash over us like waves in the ocean and carry us to shores unseen. It is easy to speak in hyperbole and see that we are far from where we want to be. It is easy to see how far we must go. It is hard to admit that the only way is through and one step at a time. It is always hard and knowing this does not make it easier. Nothing really makes it easier when you wage against nothing. It all feels pointless at some point and that is the point where motivation dies. Kant is not for the faint of heart but we must continue in these muddy waters. If anything sways you or moves you in a direction in which you do not want to go, it is a sign that you are not yet anchored. Like a swell in the chest, your breath gets heavier and you start to wonder where you are going and if you must go. You go and you drown. You've drowned plenty and now you wonder if you want to drown at all. You know you must break a thousand times to solidify yourself but upon breaking at the 100th you wonder where the courage to break 900 more times will come. You have abandoned the hope that motivation alone will carry you that is good. Consistency is the only vehicle you have left and it is the most boring path ever, it does not excite, you fear, and the dopamine will not let you forget. Do not forget once we came. Do not forget once we struggled to do what feels basic now. Do not forget that getting here was not mere luck but practice and patience. I know you feel like both are at their limit but you are merely an impetuous child, one who has much to learn, in the ways of being, becoming and the world. We forget so easily. We slip into the past like old clothes and bad habits. We forget. We forget. We wonder why we forget as we forget still. It is an infernal loop human memory. So we learn, we forget, we strive, we fail, we loop. Squabbling creatures in the dark unaware of what lies in front of them because they are busy staring off in the distance at what could be or ought to be, but cannot for the life of me focus on what is. We spoke of anchors and tethers, we spoke of what keeps the boat steady and what the waves take with them. We spoke of what we embody and how we do it. It's not a fantasy that we live but a reality in which the right thing does mostly nothing. It mostly does nothing, like it doesn't move the flames of the heart in any particular direction. You could do the right thing for 50 consecutive days and feel more adrift and lost at sea than you did when you did the wrong thing. So what does doing the right thing bring, what does it accumulate to that successive days should be a goal, an achievement. I don't have an answer for you. But I know that doing the wrong thing disables me from putting a roof over the foundation. That the foundation is what is the most important thing we can have besides the anchor. That the foundation remains when everything else is gone. That within the depths I saw it, like a sinking ship in the night disappear into the waters submerged once again by that great darkness. Yet you are here at the page, not anywhere else. Present against the thoughts that would drag you to the bottom of your being. I have been there, I have seen it. I have stared it in the eyes and I have been honest with it. Left me emptier than the water aisle at grocery stores during a hurricane. Yet we muster. We put on our boots, we wipe our tears and we muster. Ahead. Lonely. Alone. We muster the courage to put one foot in front of the other and scream into the void you may break me a 1000 times but you will not own me. I am my own, and no I may not believe it entirely now, someday I must. Someday is not today but today is the reflection that someday might bring. Anchored you are not, anchored you haven't been. Anchor that anchor you seek, you found and rejected because you knew not what it meant to be anchored. Now you beseech it to come back and it won't. You must build your anchor, you must build your foundation, You must build anything you want to rely on otherwise you must watch it crumble again and again. So what keeps me going, what anchors me now. All my goals are not the goals of a dreamer, are they? What goal keeps you going now. None, to be fair, I stopped looking at goals to get me going, I don't know what keeps me going, maybe it is a giant ball of shame. Maybe it is the dreams of a younger me in which I found something I can accomplish. Maybe it is that I have become accustomed to fighting the void, the nothing, the wasteland that no other adversary would suffice. Maybe I have fooled myself into thinking that I need something to go on when going on in itself is enough. I do want to go somewhere though. I don't want to be confined to the likes of the now. My destination is far from where I am I can feel it in my bones. I belong somewhere. Something out there even by accident created me and imbued me with a sense of something. Something I can't quite explain but it hungers. Call it intuition. Call it space, void or purpose. Call it what you want but it keeps me going. When my knees bleed and my voice breaks, when my chest tightens and it hurts more to keep going than to give up something picks me up and says I must go on. If not for myself, for who, for what? Simply to go on. Because the earth will shake and the foundation will be rocked, will it stand tall? Will it crumble? I look at my hands for nothing else could build it. This started as a thesis on anchors and what people use to anchor themselves to this world. To this floating rock in the middle of nowhere that has been spinning for how long. It is futile in the scheme of the grandiose and the spectacular but it is the everyday that makes it so grandiose and spectacular. The training montages in movies are only 10% of the movie yet they account for 90% of life. The void does not care whether you like it, hate it or love it. It exists whether you are here to wage war or if you never existed at all, so why fight it? Why indeed fight the void. It does not let me anchor. Is that not reason enough. Reason enough a foolish endeavor it might be but we have come too far to turn back. Perhaps not, we could turn back, crawl into that little hole and accept our place in the world. A world made not by us or for us and one that seems to be intent on being against us. We could turn back and cave. Live in regret and on the edge of where hope dies so that we may never miss an opportunity to shame ourselves. We could do that. Or we could keep going, one foot forever heavier than the other. One leg intent on going forward and one intent on being dragged. We could keep going with wet pants and dry lungs. We could keep going with no shoes and no shirt and a sun beaten back. We should keep going. Not because we have come too far to go back. Simply because we know once we came and we know not where we are going and one is better than the other and the only way to find out which is if we experience both. We work towards building a foundation that sinks a little less and protects a little more. Because we must.

This might be liquor in me but I'm feeling a tingling sensation that I will be able to write something beautiful over the next couple of days. The feeling not only stems from the multitude of sips I took from this mimosa but also from a deep, deep place in my heart. My days are still overshadowed by thoughts of her, but lately realized that I had an issue finishing anything I liked too much, because I never wanted it to end but I actively sought the end. I pushed everything to the edge and hoped that whatever stared back was something beautiful. Negotiated with death on trivial matters. I walked the path alone yet we were an ensemble. I have many regrets. The title of this reads I love this woman. But one question remains unanswered amidst all of this turmoil. Why did you think it was okay to hurt her as such. I did not think it was okay. I knew it was wrong but that did not stop me. Why you ask? Because then I did not know what I had. I am not saying that was the reason. I did not know what I had, I did not feel worthy of it, I was terrified. Those are all excuses that do not engage the behavior or the underlying cause of the problem. Because two things can be true at once even when they seem opposite. I love this person and I hurt this person. This seems like an easy thought to follow because those two feelings are not ever adjacent when one talks about love. Lest we forget that part of love is our ability to endure. Not only at the cost of our own comfort but for those who cheer for us when no one else is. Part of me will always try to explain what happened as best I can. Not because I need an answer. The answer to me is simple I was selfish, afraid and arrogant. Those are the things that lead me there, but what lead me to those things. Invariably a multitude of things. For one my inability to communicate any discomfort. This is two fold, whenever I needed space I was afraid to ask, because I had already been categorized as distant and it had been a topic of contention I did not need to prolong any further. This is not to shift blame, it was my responsibility to communicate you do not reside inside my mind. All too often we hope that someone will realize something we have not told them. All too often they do, but it is rarely the thing we wished they had noticed. Arrogance, I thought I could get away with it. Not in the long run but I thought in this moment I could. Because then I was at my lowest. I needed to feel in control of something (this statement bothers me mostly because it is true in a way I cannot explain yet). I was also jealous of your progress. I did not know how to articulate that. Not jealous in the sense that I did not wish for you to succeed. If anyone deserves to succeed it is you. Jealous because I became afraid that I would no longer be enough for you. Enough to provide the life that you want. Which made me resent myself and in turn you for making me resent myself. A simple conversation could have solved both issues. At the time I did not know how to articulate those issues. It may seem simple now but it was anything but. Fear is a component of my life that I engage with everyday. It is not one that I discuss with many people however (until recently I discussed it with no one). I have many fears. That I will never be enough. That I will never find love. That I will never get out of poverty to name a few. Yet I was enough for someone, I was loved by someone. I was too busy looking at the fear to realize what was in front of me. I seek neither absolution nor forgiveness. I don't think I deserve them. (One of the simple reasons in the beginning of why I never reached out was I would picture our wedding day, I would picture the toast. Me standing by your side raising a glass to the wonderful woman that you are telling all these people that I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Yet I did that. I betrayed your trust, I let someone else come in between us. That thought haunted me day and night, in my dreams, in my car, at work, at the coffee shop, on the plane. It was torture, yet I would go through it all again if it could mean I could erase your pain.) I now realize that thought was absolutely stupid, why did I care what those people thought. They weren't real, the only person whose thoughts I should have been concerned with were yours. I am so sorry for that. It may seem like I have an inability to move on. I may as well state here that I do. Moving on to me seems contrarian. If it keeps you tied to me in a way you do not wish to be that is worse. I do not want worse for you. I may have to accept that I am not the best for you. (this is not a limiter, you can always improve.) If I should move on, and I have thought plenty about this. I have no wish or desire for another person. Not because I shall love you for the rest of my days (I will, I have no choice in the matter, it is futile to fight it, admit it and move on.) but rather my love for you seems to endure time not as a dimension but as a condition.