after the weekend

After the weekend, my week starts, and I have returned to my old habit of being stressed out all the time.

Something about these uncharacteristically warm autumn days gets me thinking, usually about nothing in particular.

"What is the greatest experience you can have? It is...the hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
-- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Kaufmann translation)

I had never read Nietzche before, though I knew a good deal about him (or so I believed). I think my friend Matt ascertained it best: reading Nietzche is difficult because "either you're going into it biased, in which case you may as well not even bother, or you're going into it blind, which is worse." I found myself to be one of the former, at least, until I began to read. What I did not find was a sense of disgust at the absolute blasphemy, nor that disdain of what I would term to be overly "emo," and therefore not worth attention.

Instead, what I found was compassion and pity. I owe it to reading the translator's notes at the beginning of the book, detailing Nietzsche's bad digestion, near-blindness, and migraines that would hold him hostage for days at a time, among other things. Yet it was not simply the physical maladies of the slight, slightly stooped man that caused me to pity him. It was when the translator spoke of him as an "utterly lonely man" that I began to feel very sorry for him. I hated myself for having thought ill of him simply on the basis of quotes which I read completely out of context. Rather than seeing Nietzsche as the sneering, arrogant, angry Modern who writes "God is dead" simply to draw a reaction, I saw him for what he was: unaffected, tortured, and utterly lonely.

Nietzche himself would hate me for pitying him, as when he writes,...The hour when you say: "What good is my pity? Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who loves man?"
But I have found that while being compassionate towards other people can sometimes be a burden, it is far lighter than the feeling of guilt for refusing to sympathize for a fellow human being.

We live in an age where the individual is considered the supreme entity. Self-consciousness, self-awareness, self-improvement, self-confidence, self-esteem, self-help, self-indulgence, and the list continues.

Let me put it this way: if you ever have need of a camera, you only need to go so far as a teenager's bathroom to find one.

Clearly, we are obsessed with ourselves.

I heard a statistic once that said the average person spends only 5%-10% of his or her time thinking about other people. This is a problem. Isn't it interesting how, along with our total vanity, we are now seeing an utter breakdown of community? Families are imploding upon themselves, countries are divided, and bombs rip apart entire neighborhoods daily, all because people are so busy pushing their own agendas that they have forgotten what is truly important: life, love, breath, friendship, family, cooperation.

If we put all of our effort into ourselves, what is left after we die? It is like renovating a home after it has been condemned to be demolished. It is pointless. I recognize that it is not always easy to put other people before yourself. But then, that which is truly rewarding is never easy. And so I offer a challenge:

"This is ME. This is what I am. This is what I do. This is what I think. This is MY opinion. This is what's important to ME."

Just stop.

Banish these thoughts. They are poverty and filth and wretched contentment.

Today is the day to ask someone, "What is important to you?"