Interests

I have too many interests. Sometimes I wish I could find something to focus on. But I probably never will. Always leaping all over the place.

What are they?

Art, music, fashion, politics, love, sex, revolution, English, Japanese, East Asian languages, Chinese characters, history, beauty, philosophy, time, anthropology, zen, Buddhism, history of religion, dancing, psychedelic trance, progressive house, progressive trance, tai chi, French, cinema, French cinema, Italy, German, medicine, farming, agriculture, nature conservation, ecology, permaculture and all aspects of natural farming and land management, the history of land management, forestry and its history, communication, human relationships, schooling, anti-schooling, popular culture, tv, critical theory, food, cooking, diy, zines, squatting, Venezuela, South America, Spanish, the rennaissance, the occult, alchemy, homoeopathy, Chinese medicine, indigenous cultures, indigenous languages, dialects and language variance, vocabulary, etymology, poetry, fiction, masturbation, relaxing, sleeping, swimming, skiing, soccer, qi gong, zazen, ...

Well that is a few of them. I like drinking and taking drugs too. No wonder I feel a little unfocused a lot of the time.

There is this kind of expectation or culture in our lives that says we should stick to one thing. This is largely bound up with the institution of work and the division of labour which says that we ought to confine ourselves to a role as cogs in a great machine producing capital. I reject this culture.

Yet how to realise a full spectrum of interests in the face of this culture. How to resist not the self but the system. My experience thus far is that it is hard to realise a full life because either work sucks all one's time into a narrowly defined area of labour or lack of work prodcues a lack of structure which sucks all one's motivation, one's connection with other people and hence one's ability to create freely. We definitely need people in our lives who help us to discipline ourselves and help us to reflect on our practice. At the same time we need loving relationships with ourselves which enable us to be strong and to resist. We need self-discipline and self-acceptance.

My interests manifest as behaviours, as thoughts, as choices to read, to think, to engage in dialogue, to visit museums, to lie in bed. There is no reality separate from this continuous flow. So why do I seek to bind it to a grand narrative structure? It is hard to live in the uncertainty of the present. It is hard not to grasp. To try to force each aspect of experience into a grand master narrative that leaps out of the ashes of the eternal and tries to bind the yet unrealised future to the dead weight of the past.

The struggle continues.