Tyranny and Zen

The constant judgment peppering every personal decision, when to wake up, what to eat, who to speak to, feeling guilt about everything I did, or more likely, didn't do, wore me down. I chose to abandon deciding good and bad. Things just are the way they are, and we are stuck in language that forces our habits. We change ever so slightly, by our own will or outside influence.

I started recently abandoning sources of self-judgment, thoughts about everyone but me doing something fun, a tyranny of "doing more fun shit than you" kind of society was a nagging curseword that I'd blame myself for. I'd blame myself for not having all the fun I thought people were having. That is a good one, an old pestering bitch.

Another was me getting riled up because of casual monitoring of global news outlets, which just recently crept back in because of something a co-worker said, causing shivers of worry in me, and who wouldn't it worry, the threat of a nuclear fuckshow threatens to bring the stability that has been in my life, for my whole life to the end. [Me, a knowledge slave, what did I do to deserve this?]

On Saturday, I go to Japan, where I hope to understand something about the customs, and grace of the society, how it may feel to be Japanese is another story. How or why would I possibly identify, just as I may be personally inhibited to envision myself as a German, or person of African descent, or anywhere, but where I'm from, I suppose. It was on a whim, this decision to go. I like to travel and experience rebirth in places, and I want to open up to a friend I am meeting there. When love gets closer, I get scared I'll open up too much, and end up in a hole of my own judgment. I feel so close to personal tragedy crawling through a loveless desert of work, and now I am nearing a place of tragedy, awe and overcoming, in Japan.

The geopolitical tension growing in that area and my recovery from self-hate converging is so much amplification of this life than I ever thought I could experience, and it is a liberation of these worries, and there is something empty that's left. It is peaceful. I stand on the train contemplating peace in the morning, and the way other people stand, and we go underground and we aren't scared, we may be tired, and think same weary thoughts.

Traveling puts me into a subconscious version of myself, in a way it unleashes a powerful way of being, an uninhibited forgetting myself, a benign delight in "survival", mimicry of what travel once was for explorers, traders, people under the spell of a crusade, a conviction, distilled into simple sharing via sign language with locals. The sheer grace and simplicity of conversation, an affirmation that we are 1+1=2 is closure.

I want closure on a past chapter of life, of fear, and would even risk being closer to a potential war to get there.