Inside the log cabin was a crackling fire and a cozy hearth, covered in a soft, round, red carpet. And on that carpet, there I was, a child of four years old. I had no expression on my face for I was in complete security, without fears, wrapped in the assurance that I was cared for and could never be hurt.
A force, not unlike the love of my parents, but stronger, coming from an ultimate life source, permeated my presence, granting me perfect serenity.
I felt all the blurry beauty of nostalgia, but it was real.
]]>It is also important to keep your cognitive channels open and clear of pollution. There will always be many outside events in your life, and your ability to filter these outside events has great consequences. If you allow doubts, stress and other negativity into your life, they can stop up your lines of communication with your internal world.
A fantasy world, when facilitated properly, is a tool with which to enjoy our lives. It makes up a large part of the sense of freedom we feel. When we can fully utilize our gift of mental creation, we can revel in the ideas we love most, and ultimately, use those ideas to color our external world as well.
]]>Our society teaches us to group these micro-events into clusters, or macro-events, such as meetings, football games, and vacations. Clock time is the most obvious example of aggregating micro-events into macro-events. It is easier to say “I went to the mall for three hours” then “I walked 8,000 steps, my heart beat 10,800 times, my retina collected 48,616 visual stimuli,” and so forth.
Yet, although it is clear how convenient these macro-events are for communication, they have caused an adverse effect in our lives as well. People are apt to make themselves busy, outwardly or inwardly, in order to distract themselves from the true issues they are concerned about. Although they may not realize it, being busy is just the act of causing many events to occur, and thus causing one’s time to pass quicker.
Once we realize that time is merely a succession of micro and macro-events, we can use it to our advantage. Rather than making many events occur in order to speed up our perception of time, we can make fewer events occur - slowing down time - and giving us a better ability to reflect on and appreciate our lives.
The inevitability of becoming a noticeable entity that is constantly at the whim of its environment is difficult to accept. Invisibility tempts me with its promise to provide a complete respite from the worries and fears of the outside world. While I do value my self-dependence, sometimes it would just feel good to wrap myself in the security of anonymity, and let everyone and everything go.
]]>Sinking into your subconscious is the subject of one of my other writings; what I emphasize here is specifically facilitating a lack of connection with the outside world. It requires active thinking to recognize thoughts that are tied to the outside world, since those thoughts are all classified as “normal:” I wonder if my mom is mad at me. I hope I got an ‘A’ on that test. It would be great if I met someone at tonight’s party. But separating out thoughts that are bound to circumstances you can’t control can be crucial.
When things are going well for a day, a week, or a moment, it doesn’t seem necessary to retreat from the outside world. But when things are going poorly, all you want to do is get away from the source of the negativity. It is important to know how to do that. There are already things that are built into your life that are constant and very much under your control. Use those things to comfort yourself. Savor them.
When I was taking midterms in college, I used to relish the few moments after I got under my bed covers but before I went to sleep. I often found myself smiling involuntarily the moment my weight sank into the mattress. Shuffling off the stress of the day and slipping into my own personal world felt incredible. Even now, I sometimes think to myself how much I enjoy those last conscious moments, and how it’s too bad they’re so close to sleep as to render themselves blurry in my memory.
Other ways I block out the world temporarily are through writing, video games, and music. The last is probably the most common way people temporarily secede from the world. And in a way, all art is a form of escape – an escape that is so fundamental to human living that every culture from every time period has participated in it.
It is important to vivify your mental alone-time, to recognize and seize upon it. The respite you’ll receive from blocking out the world once in a while could sweeten your life experience.
]]>Therein lies the paradox of writing – remaining true to your feelings within the boundaries of your audience’s tastes. In life, too, we adapt our behavior to the people and situations we encounter, which is why writing often tells us so much about who we are.
]]>Peter Pans accept this reality but enjoy it more than most. They live vicariously through their own lives as if they were the protagonist of a story. Their relationship with themselves is like a reader’s relationship with a sympathetic narrator.
Yet “narcissisism” with all of its unpleasant connotations continues to be the word of choice for describing Peter Pan Syndrome. It makes sense that the same people that consider childlike characteristics a “syndrome” would err in their characterization of Peter Pans. Many of the people who disseminate knowledge in our society - especially psychologists, journalists, and religious leaders - are set on standardizing people’s lives and minds. They have lost touch with the unbridled imaginational freedom of childhood; the very concept that life’s possibilities may be endless stands in stark contrast to their work.
Ultimately, most people do succumb to the prescribed order of things, forgetting what they knew as an idealistic child. But that is why it is so important to have a subset of people who draw from their own raw, creative energy to remind us of how colorful life really is.
Narcissism translated as inspired self-immersion, as it is with Peter Pans, is not only positive, but necessary to our world. When life seems to have lost its original purpose amongst societal responsibilities, a connection with the vast and limitless mindscape of childhood may be the only antidote.
We all wonder sometimes about the purpose of life; often, we do so because we are searching for a way to justify death. And yet, the only way to understand death is to fully experience our everyday lives. Living life consciously involves thoughtful observation – not just of the outside world, but of our inner life. We should be taking note of our sense of identity at a particular time – our level of confidence, our anxieties, our far-flung wishes. If we have some record of our state of being at a given point in time, we can observe our personal evolution and ultimately gain some insight into our patterns and purpose.
And yet, as arduous as it may seem to keep track of all of our internal and external events, the feat can be achieved easily if we simply relax our definition of time. If we can view time as an invention of humans – and therefore not as linear and infinitely-accumulating as it seems in the abstract – we realize that life, and memory, are our collage to paste together however we wish. All the clues we need to figure out life’s meaning come from examining the collage as a whole and finding patterns of passion, compulsion, and purpose.
Therefore, experience the present vividly as it unfolds. In an ecstatic moment, allow the chemicals in your brain to percolate. Taste the pleasure as it pours out. In a bitter moment, allow the pins of pain to push through you. Fight the urge to close your eyes. Imbibe and absorb your emotions as if you were a child experiencing them for the first time. It is only through active involvement in your life, however exciting or mundane, that you can start to draw conclusions about why you are here.
In the end, this kind of conscious existence will give you far more solace than even the most successful unexamined life. For only those who have a clear vision of living can accept their passage into the next expanse.
I cannot excuse this state of affairs as inevitable, saying passive things like “Well, what can you do? Life happens.” That’s precisely the point: life does happen and it is a sacred thing – it deserves to be remembered. If you overcommit yourself, the days of your life will fly by you, unexamined and unrecognizable. It is a basic human instinct to contemplate existence, to dream, and to fantasize. Yet we are stuck distracting ourselves.
People would be far more content if they devoted more time to self-reflection. I feel that there are four basic ways to spend time: goal-oriented time spending (work, school, sports, games), emotional immersion (friendship, love), sensory gratification (sex, eating, drugs), and philosophical contemplation. The last is the rarest, and one of the most valuable ways to occupy yourself, for it centers you around your existence and gets you closer to your connection with birth, life, and the energy that envelopes everything.
I, like everyone else, am in love with the external life – the one that is filled with subjective judgments and fashions, where people win and lose at competitions, where social rituals can lead to ecstasy or extreme disappointment. Yet I realize its transience. Those who cannot confront the larger meaning of life are avoiding an essential realization – one that can be frightening if it is avoided for years, and, once recognized, can be a calming and satisfying act in all its wonder and complexity.
So do not overburden yourself, take time to think and be, and realize that getting a lot done won’t necessarily make you feel more content. The external world is filled with uncertainties – but the internal world, the one that can only be accessed when the mind is quiet, is the only place where you can truly feel at peace.
Contrary to what you may have absorbed from the media, difficulty focusing is not limited to those with ADHD. It affects all people. If we were always able to attain a high level of concentration, our true intelligence would come out and all of our latent ideas – the ones we know we have but can just never seem to put into words - could finally be exploited. The difference between those who get As in schools and those who get Cs, between those who gets 1100s on their SATs and those who get 1600s, between those who discuss insights with their friends and those who write great books, easily comes down to the ability to concentrate.
What kind of a solution exists? Again, popular wisdom would have you believe that drugs like Ritalin and Adderall are the only known antidotes to this mental blurriness. But I believe that there is another, more natural solution. It stems from the fact that difficulty concentrating usually comes in two forms: simple interference by outside thoughts and a more subtle attrition due to background stress. In the first case, which is common to all people, outside thoughts like what you’re having for dinner or a recent spat with a significant other, replace the subject matter you’re currently studying. In the second case, which becomes more common the older you get, your ability to focus is slowly worn away by stresses that you don’t even realize you have. That unpaid telephone bill, or the fact that you don’t have enough romance in your life, or worries about global warming, distract you from the material in front of you.
The problem with drugs like Ritalin and Adderall, to the extent they do improve concentration, is that they do not address this second factor, background stress. Rather, they simply dull your mind to all but the material in front of you, which can be helpful, but also comes with undesirable side effects like a general lack of enthusiasm. Even if they were helpful, these drugs are marketed for people with ADHD and thus are not legally obtainable by the average person who could use a boost in focus.
If we could somehow remove this background stress, concentration could be improved and many more people would magically “become” intelligent. Other than years of therapy, what could possibly dispose of these deep-seated worries? I’ve found that the answer lies in immersing oneself in unreal worlds. Imagination, which can come from reading books, writing, or simply dreaming up fantastic situations, is a valuable tool in improving concentration. By conjuring up fanciful worlds like you used to do as a child, you isolate yourself from real world worries, placing yourself on a different plane.
Reading fictional books, for instance, immerses you in a place far away from the one in which you physically dwell. This actually relaxes you. Have you ever wondered why reading tends to put you to sleep? Well, I’m sure there’s some scientific reason relating to the soporific side effects of visually scanning words on paper, but I believe that the real reason is that reading takes you out of the real world. Stress keeps you awake; fantasy relaxes you, causing you to drift off into your subconscious. So if you’re going to try reading as a means of improving your concentration, remember not to read a newspaper. The real world events contained in a newspaper only increase background stress. The key is relaxation.
Again we find that children, whose lives contain so much more imagination than those of adults, have the advantage. To the extent that mentally healthy children have difficulty focusing, I’d say that outside interference of ideas - thoughts of frolicking around in the playground – are the sole cause. So if we can present children with interesting subject matter, giving them good reason to concentrate on what’s in front of them, we can fully utilize their ability to concentrate.
And for the adults, try taking a lesson from the children. If you have a presentation or an exam tomorrow, don’t cram and worry yourself even further; immerse yourself in fantasy. Separate yourself from real-world worries. Suddenly, you may just find yourself with a lot more clarity.
]]>The self-imposed pressure Peter Pan overachievers bring upon themselves dates back to their first concepts of good and bad. As toddlers, they learned how to behave by gauging their parents’ reactions. Good actions garnered praise, giving them a positive and affirming feeling - so they kept trying to be good. But as the Peter Pan Syndromers became toddlers, their standards for good behavior changed. No longer was listening, eating your food, and going potty enough. The onset of school brought with it the notion of competition, and now, they had to do better than others. They were graded – albeit in areas like sharing, relating to peers, and respecting elders – but still graded. In later years, the competition got stronger. Classes became stratified by skill level, and tests separated kids into discrete intellectual categories. By the time high school and college came around, these individuals were so programmed to compete that finally, one day, a realization occurred – “What is all this hard work even for? Is it all going to lead to happiness somehow, or am I just trapped in a cycle of working towards endless theoretical goals? What happened to the good old days when people were proud of me just for being nice to others? Everything has gotten so complicated.”
This is the point at which a Peter Pan Syndromer learns that he has Peter Pan Syndrome: when the world seems to spin out of control with falsely alluring goals, and all he wants to do is return to the simplicity of childhood.
Yet few others understand. Society runs like a well-oiled machine. The media enforces its ethics and people become intoxicated with normalcy. Meanwhile, the stubborn Peter Pan Syndromer is wondering what is going on around him. Why is everyone walking the same way, wearing the same clothing, using the same expressions, believing in the same philosophies? He feels the need to find someone like him, another eternal child with whom he can run away, back to the simple land of laughter and imagination. To do so he must escape from the land of taxes, bills, and bosses. So he works hard. He pretends to be normal, playing by all the rules. And he makes money. One day, he will use that money to emancipate himself from the rigid limitations of the world. Even if he has to wait until he is old, he will eventually become a kid again.
In every large company and organization, there is at least one Peter Pan Syndromer. He’s dressed like a drone but he wishes he weren’t. He wants to be free. And he will be – someday.
]]>Having a crush is a euphoric, desperate, compulsive state of being. It is truly a life-affirming experience.
]]>Pure love happens to some people many times, to others only once, and to still others not at all. The ability to experience pure love depends upon the strength of your idealism. You are more likely to feel it if you are a fourteen year-old girl who believes in fairies, and less likely if you are a forty year-old investment banker who rejoices when the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates. However, no matter how old you are, you can experience pure love if you suspend your adult feelings for a while and allow yourself to be completely vulnerable.
I experienced pure love during the summer after I turned fifteen years old, before I had ever kissed a girl. I met Melissa on a family vacation, on a cruise boat called The Inspiration. I first saw her inside the disco while I was with my family. She was sitting off to the side with a group of people I didn’t know. I eventually got the courage to go over and ask her to dance, and even though she hesitated, we were soon on the dance floor together. As it turned out, we both hated dancing, so we went outside and hung out on the steps for the rest of the night. We talked for hours, until it was time for her curfew. I remember standing up and giving her a hug goodnight, and my whole body tingling with joy once she had disappeared into the elevator.
There wasn’t a single moment I didn’t think about her for the next twenty four hours. The following night we met back at the disco. It was formal night, and she was in a velvety black dress. We skipped the dancing part this time and went to walk around on the upper level of the ship. Earlier that day, I had asked my dad for advice on how to kiss a girl and he told me to use “gentle persuasion”: to lightly lift the bottom of her chin and guide her lips toward mine. That evening, though I was looking good in my best suit, I was more nervous than I had ever been in my life. So, when she stopped walking and asked me if I wanted to go over to the balcony and watch the waves, I could feel a deep pounding inside my chest. The wind was whipping through her hair, causing it to fly about wildly, and this intensity was the only comfort I could find at that moment, for it mimicked the frenzy inside of me. After a few minutes, she asked if we could go back to her room so she could change out of her formal dress.
I was sure our moment had been ruined. But when she emerged from her stateroom a few minutes later, newly clad in jeans and smelling of some tantalizing body spray, my hope was renewed. On her suggestion, we went back up to the observation deck and returned to the exact same spot. We talked about a few ordinary things for a while, and then all at once my fear sank to the bottom of my chest like a single, dense weight, and I heard myself say “Melissa, I really like you.”
“I really like you too, Evan.”
And with that, I raised my bloodless arm, placing my hand underneath her chin, and kissed her. I tried to remember to open and close my mouth slowly, but my vision was black, and I had no feeling in my entire body. Perhaps a minute later, I regained some composure and started concentrating on what I was doing. I felt the moistness of her lips and tasted her saliva with life-affirming euphoria.
When we finally separated for a moment, she said “Wow - you’re a really good kisser.”
We spent the last four days of the cruise together. I remember the simple and expressive way she told me that she liked me, the intensity of her eyes after we kissed, and the specialness I felt when we walked around together at night, holding hands.
After the vacation, we wrote each other letters with gifts enclosed every week. We traded pictures from the vacation in one of them, she sent me a bottle of her shampoo (I worshiped the smell) in another, and I wrote her poetry in others. We called each other as much as our moms would let us. She lived ten hours north of me, but I didn’t care. I would have seen her every weekend if I had a car or the money to fly.
Meeting Melissa ushered in the worst period I had ever had in my relationship with my mom. She thought the idea of having a long distance girlfriend was impractical, and that it would only lead to disappointment for me. We fought constantly about whether I was allowed to fly out there, and although I ultimately lost the battle, I did everything short of running away from home to try to see her again. In one heated fight, I screamed at my mom: “You’ll regret this when Melissa and I get married one day and I don’t invite you to our wedding!”
About a month after the cruise, on a Tuesday night, I was sitting on the floor of my room using the twenty-minutes-every-other-day long distance time my mom had allotted me. Melissa and I were talking about how much we missed each other. Then she told me about something she had been feeling.
“I don’t know if it’s love, but I feel something...it’s like fireworks inside of me” she said.
“Really?...I do too.”
“Do you think it’s all right to say it?”
I paused. “Yeah. Let’s say it.”
“Okay, you first.”
“I...love you.”
“I love you too.”
That moment changed something chemical inside of me. I became obsessed; I started to save allowance money so I could buy calling cards and sneak extra calls to her from the pay phones at school. We planned secret times to call each other when our moms weren’t around. This went on for a few weeks.
But our parents had no intention of tolerating our unrealistic romance any longer. About three months later, after a final, climactic fight with our moms (and even a conversation between them), we agreed it was best not to talk.
The rest is history. She eventually got a boyfriend, and I started dating someone else too. Although we kept in touch for years, we never got a chance to be together. But the feelings I had during those four days on The Inspiration and afterwards for three months were as vivid and real as any feelings I have ever had. That was pure love.
My experience with Melissa is the closest thing to “true love” that I know. There are many possible interpretations, though. Some would call the impassioned excitement of a new relationship “true love,” and others would say that true love is the comfort of being with someone who understands you intimately well. To me, these states represent meaningful emotions; and indeed, there are as many types of love as there are couples. But the pure type of love that I felt when I was fifteen is different. It was life-changing and infinitely painful - the type of thing that you can only feel when your heart is as open as a child’s - and it is all that I can think of when I hear the words “true love.”
]]>Since then, a lot has changed. The world has gotten narrower as morals, societal customs, and outside expectations delineate the lives we lead. Adults have sat down seriously to explain to us the way life works, and most of us have taken the path of least resistance and followed their rules. It is easy to be convinced by them; after all, they are the ones that created children, and it is hard to imagine how out-of-touch they could be with their own childhoods. Yet even still, in the back of every person’s mind there is a place far, far away - a safe place without any pressures, where all that is left are fantasies and positive feelings. Few people still remember the promise they made to themselves when they were younger, that they’d never grow up and act like “them.” Those that have lost touch with their childhood miss out on the serenity of dwelling in their own imaginations, and the security that comes with being intimately in touch with oneself. In some way, their joy is limited by what society will allow them to feel.
In the last few years, I’ve watched myself waver between timorous child and responsible adult – and thankfully I have been able to save myself from falling into the chasm of adulthood. The struggle to remain a child and avoid the prefabricated behaviors of grown-ups has been one of the most difficult of my life, as it meets with opposition at almost every turn.
In the course of my mission to stay childlike, I’ve developed several survival skills. These techniques have effectively shielded me from the outside world:
Sinking Into Your Subconscious. Knowing how to drift off into a peaceful place where you can be alone with your imagination is fundamental to remaining a child. In order to keep your head in the clouds, practice unfocusing your eyes so that the world is a blur around you and your head feels light and fuzzy. It is easier to see inside of you if you can’t see what’s outside of you. (Make exceptions for frolics through nature or interactions with pleasant people.) If you regularly commute to adult places like schools or workplaces, buy a portable music player so you can block out their world and fill yours with sounds that put you in an uplifting or exploratory mood.
Surrounding Yourself With Other Dreamers. If you become friends with someone who gossips a lot, guess what? You’re going to hear a lot of gossip. By the same token, if you fill your social circle with positive people who share your dreamerlike qualities, your state of mind will not be interfered with as frequently and you may be able to partake in their reveries as well.
Deflecting Negativity. Negativity is unavoidable, but it can be substantially reduced if you know how to shield yourself from it. Although it is difficult to deflect negativity the way a stone wall deflects a pebble, the skill does exist and can be honed. The easiest way to do this is to follow the first two guidelines and simply steer clear of places and situations that breed negativity. However, when negative people or institutions are a part of your everyday life, one useful strategy for blocking them out is reducing them to concepts. Annoying people can be viewed as big, dumb dogs who simply don’t know better. Authority figures can be pictured naked or in highly embarrassing situations. Rude or overly-competitive people can be sorry sacks who never received enough love as children. If you can manage to keep your concepts present even when directly dealing with these individuals, you will be able to successfully deflect their negativity. For more on this subject, see Ridding Your Life Of Negative People.
Knowing How To Act Like Them. Unless you are a hermit or so powerful that nobody would ever dare try to impose their point of view on you, you will have to take on the real world sometimes. In these cases, rather than bringing further scrutiny to yourself by professing your abandonment of adulthood, simply put on an act. One important caveat: It is very important to realize you are acting while it is happening. Many teenagers act like adults with the best intentions and then quietly succumb to the pressure of following social conventions without realizing that this action is precisely what they were trying to avoid. Make sure to snap yourself out of acting mode as soon as the adults or adult-wannabes have dispersed.
Those who learn how to inhabit their own minds have the incredible ability to restore the magic of childhood. The drawback is that they will constantly be confronted by naysayers, proclaiming: “You’re not living in the real world.” But if you hear that line often enough, you know you’re doing a good job.
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