“I’m looking to sell the concept of anxiety, it’s still got the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin fully intact. I was looking to maybe even trade it for mediation and complete freedom?”
"Hrrrmm. I don’t know. The best we can do right now is give you the dizziness of freedom. No, you know what, we’ll throw in some mild immediacy to self-conscious reflection, just for you.”
In 1836, the 23-year-old Soren Kierkegaard ran up a debt of 1,262 rixdollars (381 for books, 280 for tailoring, 235 on tea and café meals, and 44 on tobacco, among many other smaller debts), which was more than the annual salary of a university professor. Luckily, his father was one of the richest men in Denmark and put him on a Dave Ramsey-style payment plan.
College students have been coming to terms with their existence by going into debt for years.
The biggest benefit of creative movement practice is direct experience. When people experience physically and fully, they discover something greater than themselves. Direct experience sounds like a simple thing. Practically, it is on the contrary, it’s exceptionally rare. Life has its strange ways of educating us to turn our back on experience and move towards efficiency. We specify how to move, what we like to move and whereabout. This specificity is like saying to new movements “you have nothing to offer me”.
It is similar to spoken word. When babies and kids hear new languages they get curious and want to understand it. Serious adults, hear words that are different than their mother tongue and think “there is nothing there for me because I don’t understand it”.
Philosopher Kierkegaard argued that most humans live in the realm of ‘Human Concern’. This realm moves between representations of past, present and future. In between temporal considerations. “I came from X so if I do Y I will arrive to Z”. But X,Y and Z describe only a network of abstract ideas that point towards a representation of reality. A system of values based on disconnection, speculation and comparison. These temporal considerations lead to life lived in the eyes and the head. The realm of human concern is the opposite of direct experience. Direct experience is connected to the only expression that is unequivocally original, the expression of change.
Change is not a set of premeditated projects. True expression is discovered through what lies outside of us. What is outside the realm of concern and the temporal? Meaningful discovery. The physical experiences that stay beyond the moment of their happening. They accompany us “timelessly” despite our inability to define what exactly makes them so special.
We don’t cage ourselves from meaningful discovery in a single day, we get habitually caged, gradually and slowly. Step by step we stop moving and stop taking risks. We stop taking leaps of faith. Movement practice should be a leap of faith. To consciously become without trying to achieve. Leaping and moving towards what’s outside. Relearning that we don’t know much more than what we know.
Søren Kierkegaard takes a vintage retro approach to this season's Twilight-inspired couture. A die-hard fan, and staunch Team Edward supporter, Kierkegaard’s journals, angst-filled and evidently inspired by Meyer's magnum opus, elaborate on this:
I ask: what does it mean when we continue to behave as though all were as it should be, calling ourselves fans according to the Twilighttetralogy, when the ideals of the series have gone out of life? The tremendous disproportion which this state of affairs represents has, moreover, been perceived by many. They like to give it this turn: the human race has outgrown Twilight. (Journals, p. 446)
This outfit inspires fear and trembling, less because of its vampiric inspiration than because of its horrible tackiness. Confronted with the choice to either wear that or something more mainstream, Kierkegaard should have went with “or”.
Aries:“Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.”
Taurus: “My standpoint is armed neutrality.”
Gemini:“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”
Cancer: “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.”
Leo: “Don’t you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?”
Virgo:“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.”
Libra:“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”
Scorpio: “Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle–what joy, then, would you have in it?”
Sagittarius: “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
Capricorn: “The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.”
Aquarius: “One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.”
If you go to grad school, you will regret it; if you do not go to grad school, you will also regret it; if you go to grad school or if you do not go to grad school, you will regret both; whether you go to grad school or you do not go to grad school, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both.
