Master or Slave?

Recently, a close friend said to me, “It seems like you’re just waiting for someone to tell you what to do.”

Her statement echoes a string of thoughts that I had been dealing with for a while now. The main thrust of the issue falls neatly, perhaps a bit too neatly, into a simple dichotomy: Am I a leader or a follower?

The question itself is somewhat flawed because no one is strictly and unanimously a leader or a follower in all aspects of their life. A general may lead an army while kneeling towards his wife. A team captain may command her teammates, while submitting to her teachers. A person may submit to their spouse when it comes to food preferences while asserting herself pointedly when it comes to religion. In essence, our life is the negotiation of concentric dimensions that constantly overlap like a sort of Venn-diagram of life at large.

However, when the issue at hand is over the direction of one’s life, then the issue becomes more pressing and forces us to take a harder line and make a clearer distinction. Our future is the most important thing we possess: if there is any realm of life where we should strive to be a leader, this is it. However, not everyone is born or raised to be a leader. Those of us with a natural proclivity towards following who try against their will to lead, create a dissonance within themselves: a conflict between what they are and what they would like to be.

But where does this “natural proclivity” come from? Is it that we are born either timorous or adventurous? Or is it that we are raised to be either obsequious or autonomous? And does free-will ever enter the picture with this question? Should we embrace our dispositions of character? Or should we fight the good fight and try to wrestle control into our hands? Is our identity ours to create? Or is it a preset outline that we have to “fill in/flesh out”? Who am I and where am I going?

Lately, I’ve been running away from the idea that I am (un)naturally a follower. I always believed that I was a natural leader by nature and that “society” was holding me back. If it wasn’t my parents, then it was my school, or my friends, or my culture, that was responsible for tying me down and preventing me from spreading my wings. But now I’ve reached a point in my life where these external impositions have by and large disappeared as serious concerns. I am done with school. I have a job. I don’t have to listen to my parents. Etc… And yet I feel as trapped and as helpless as I did when I was surrounded by those boundaries.

Asserting his or her own power, the master commands their life and is a creative force much like an artist. Demurely, the slave fawns over the piece of art created and stands back with restraint as a witness.

It is true that my natural tendency is to fall in line and obey the common trend. My disposition is that of a sedated servant. But if I am to remain faithful to my whole being, then I must also remain faithful to that glimmer of defiance within me. I may never be able to change the fact that I am a slave and a follower. So, I must change who and what I pledge my allegiance to. Rather than kneel under the weight of my parents, my society, and my culture, I must become the servant of my passions.  

But until these words becomes acts, then it all remains to be mere sophistry rather than artistry.  

On happiness

The most obvious things are also the hardest to pin down. Happiness remains as obfuscated as an idea can be. Happiness is often misidentified as being synonymous with being comfortable, content, and even-keeled. Nothing could be further from the truth. Happiness—true happiness that resembles a kind of heavenly bliss—is a fleeting state that we come in and out of. It is not, and cannot, be a state of being or an attitude. The absence of discomfort, pain, and tension does not indicate the presence of happiness. Happiness is the result of working for or towards a specific goal. It is an unintentional byproduct of being engaged in an activity. Pouring endless hours into an art project, practicing nonstop for an athletic event, reaching deep to untapped potentials of energy—these are activities that result in a person being happy.

On the flip side of this, to be happy in the highest, most fulfilling sense of the idea, one has to risk misery. Being happy requires courage. Happiness is the result of tension, stress, and activity. Sometimes we pour more energy and emotion into something than we can hardly bare, only to have it backfire on us—broken loves, lost athletic contests, fumbled aesthetic endeavors, etc. Because ecstatic happiness brings with it the risk of ultimate misery, people avoid it altogether. Quick fixes, television, junk food, and the internet have come to redefine happiness for the modern world. Happiness is confused with that which comes easy and with “the absence of pain.” The television zombie will never experience the happiness that an artist does; the couch potato will never experience the happiness that an athlete does; the wealthy and privileged whom have had everything handed to them, will never experience the happiness that a hard-worker does.

The highest forms of happiness resemble experiences of a transcendent nature. We completely and utterly lose ourselves within them. It is ecstasy in the fullest sense of the word. The self is so engaged by the activity that for that instant you are the activity no matter what it is: you are the canvas, you are the melodies, you are the sport, you are the pure and engaged energy.

This is why the leisurely are the ones with existential ailments. A person whose life is completely devoid of pain, discomfort, and struggle, is also devoid of meaning, purpose, and true happiness. Philosophy may be an activity reserved for the leisurely but happiness is an experience reserved for the disadvantaged.