- What? What the fuck is life about?! The kind of thoughts that go through my head, I can’t make any sense of them. I feel stuffed after my dinner, and I feel my bloated belly and think about my dad; I think about his slight stature, his bald scalp and his droopy belly. What kind of physique did he have when he was my age? Am I doing well compared to him? I’d like to be fitter than he is when I’m his age. It’s hard to get fit though; I’m not a naturally athletic guy. Or at least, I didn’t have the right habits instilled in me to be more athletic and have more of a tendency towards it. Because potential, that may be in almost anyone, but potential means nothing without the right habits, and without the desire and dedication to achieve something. But first habits, mostly habits.
I think about my dad, and how he didn’t instil the right habits in me. And why not? Because he didn’t have those habits himself, and it seemed he never learnt their importance, or if he did, then he never managed to instil them in himself. Was it a question of strength? Was my dad just not strong enough to overcome himself? Would I be strong enough to overcome myself? Oh, but that’s surely not all it comes down to. To say that a man is or is not strong enough to overcome himself – is that not to answer the question with its own presuppositions? If we say a man is strong enough to change himself, then we are not talking about true overcoming, but about a gift he’d been endowed with by nature. Overcoming always appeared to me to consist of cultivating strength in oneself. How, then, may we ask whether a man can be strong enough to make himself strong? How are we to even phrase the question? Where are we to find this strength that precedes strength?
Then I think about my future children. Do I have the right habits to instil in them? God, no, I’m a mess. What kind of person thinks they’re ready to have kids? People who don’t feel any trepidation about the possibility of offspring horrify me; to become a parent is to be guilty of the greatest arrogance, and the greatest harm towards one’s children. Our original sin was against our Father, when we ate from the tree of knowledge. But we commit another original sin, an original sin against our children the moment we bring them to life; did not God himself commit the original sin when he planted the tree’s seed in the ground?
To return to your question, no, I do not have what it takes to be a good parent. When will I get there? Have I not been striving for this my whole life? To reach that point where I can finally say – I am fine, I am complete, I don’t need to change anymore. But that point will never come, and I’ve accepted it long ago; so why can’t I just live with it? Why do I keep racking my brains about what it is I’m doing with my life? My life, my life; what does it come down to? Philosophy is great, but sometimes I wonder if my life goes beyond these kinds of meaningless, sporadic thoughts, these little niggling anxieties and uncertainties that go almost unnoticed through my mind in never-ending loops, unable to break out of their own vicious cycles; breakthroughs come when these cycles exhaust and spend themselves. And I wonder if my preoccupation with philosophy doesn’t miss the point sometimes? Is there not something behind philosophical questions which is obscured by those very questions? Does my life not consist in precisely those little anxieties and niggling uncertainties, regrets and accusations, that are so common-place we do not even bother to consign them to our memory? I will sooner remember a trip to the local corner shop than give a second thought to the thought I had about my dad earlier.
If this was a story, a ‘proper’ narrative, would I not be recounting to you my trip to the shop, how I bought a pack of tobacco and the huge Asian man behind the till who looked ready to crush me for interrupting while a game of football was being shown on television? Some people call this kind of story ‘stories about nothing’, and tell us that those stories are about real life, as though the role of literature was to be as true to real life as possible, and as though life could be ascertained or pinned down to one quality or tendency, as though is was the tendency of life? So is life about nothing? It seems to me that this nothing, even in the most banal and repetitive of daily tasks, is a loud, noisy grind, an endless stream of thoughts and struggles, always taking form, shaping up, looking like culminating, but always disappointing, always failing.
So what is potential? Potential is nothing without actualisation. Potential can only be claimed in retrospect, after one has exerted one’s potential.
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