Self-improvement (or Live Life, Make Stories)

It's currently 1:11 AM, four hours and forty-nine minutes before I'm slated to leave for my first year of college at MIT. I've been wandering around my house for the past half-hour or so, gathering all the final electronics, toiletries, and other miscellania that eluded other attempts at packing from this past week. Amidst this, I think the fact has finally hit me: I'm about to leave what's been my home for the past eighteen years for something... well, mostly unknown.

There's all of the traditional uncertainties about leaving house and home and family that come with this, and fears of new situations to be sure, but right now I want to think about a different view of this critical point: the chance for self-improvement.




[Ed: That's a loaded phrase if I ever saw one.]

So what does it mean? What is self-improvement? Is it based some model of what the perfect person should be, based on personality, physique, or other patho-physical-mental trait? Or maybe out of some goal of ultimate happiness? Or how about an improved dedication to a moral standard?

Well... yes. And no.

The answer is as subjective as it is obvious; it's obvious because it's subjective. Self-improvement is whatever a person wants it to be. And that brings me to the second part of my title: Live Life, Make Stories. It's a philosophy that I've put a lot of thought into over the past year or so. Fairly shallow in idea and statement, and intentionally so--the lack of depth makes it easy to prescribe to, but its effects are deep.

Too often in my life I've fallen into the trap of simply existing: going day-by-day, doing what's required or expected because it's "right" and "important" and "necessary" (which to be fair it often was) but barely expanding beyond that. Everything was pretty much based off of some long-term ideal of the path to happiness and perfection, ignoring the fact that the path was as important as the destination [Ed: oh lord the cliches, here they come].

What that left me was an utter lack of satisfaction, an existence where I looked at my interactions with others and asked "Could I really say that I made any meaningful, lasting stories or memories with this person?" More often than not, the answer was "No."

In a world where almost everything about people is defined by how they relate to other people in a sort of quasi-recursive infinite loop (who are you? well, what's your job, who is your family, are you in a relationship, what are your political stances?, et cetera), an existence sans memories and stories is a pretty sad one. Which all brings me back to my resolution: live life, make memories. Live moment to moment sometimes, do unexpected things, expand your view, take risks, and make connections with people--because in the end, these will be the things that we remember, more than the road to the future.

I was going to include an example by way of a story about a concert from this past summer, but that will have to wait for another post. I'll leave you with this guitar pick for now:

Good night [Ed: morning?], and wish me luck!