Clutter

I'm currently sitting in my new apartment adorned with boxes stifled with an assortment of junk. I know I have to face these things and unpack them and compartmentalize most of these things in some form of order and throw out the rest, but I can't bring myself to do it. At least not yet. Call it laziness which it most likely is, but I saw it asn an interesting metaphor (yes, this is one of THOSE blogs).

As a writer there's a lot of junk up in my head that hasn't been unpacked yet. It's been here for a few days, for a few moments, for many years. Ideas that haven't been fully formed yet or fully transferred onto the page, to serve as a means of actually DOING something. I think this is true for everyone. We all have our own junk, our own issues, our own obsessions that we just sort of box up for the time being, to unpack later on in life. The more we box things up, the tighter our space gets and the less comfortable we become, unable to move as freely as we once were.

The process of unpacking these thoughts, of giving light to a lot of the clutter we chose not to face for the longest time isn't the most fun of experiences. Most times there are good reasons for boxing up the clutter, reasons that we don't want to have to acknowledge but that exist nonetheless.

The more my apartment becomes furnished and in a sense evolves into a more idealized state, the more I think about the boxes, still sitting there in the corner of my apartment, building dust. I get transfixed on how nice the apartment is becoming WITHOUT those things, how a lot of my "valuables" there are negligible, how I really don't want to deal with all that junk that I collected at the old apartment. I think of throwing them out, living off of what already is in here.

But then I realize that that isn't necessarily true. I take comfort in those boxes, of knowing that if I ever one day will need something from my old apartment, from my old life, they will always be there. As long as I don't touch them or move them elsewhere; as long as I don't open them to really look inside. At least not yet. Not until I really NEED to. There's a comfort there.

That comfort though is a bit superficial. It only represses the needs we all need to acknowledge, the fears we all have to face. We can look at how nice things may look right now around us, or how terrible they are in front of us, but these things will always be with us unless we unpack them, compartmentalize them. Open up their boxes and allow them to be free to be stored and used or trashed in ways that free up more space, so we don't carry so much weight in our day.

This would liberate ourselves into making a more realized life, one that can balance the idealized perspective with reality; a counter-weight for our dreams to keep us grounded.

American

This post is overdue by quite a few days. Inspired from a radio interview I heard conducted with Richard Wright on the Fourth of July, he was asked what he thought made up his American identity. I thought about the question and applied it to my own life and decided I should type up something about it. This, as of now, is the end of my procrastination to that question.

I view my American identity as a product of growing up in a family that had it hard to begin with but were able to rise above the obstacles presented to them by life. There were struggles for my parents that they were able to move beyond by following a rigid work ethic that was instilled in me and my siblings from a very young age. With these ethics came a sense of manners and right and wrong. We were raised in a Christian household which provided the foundation for the values that I would later on adapt for myself. My parents were able to work in successful jobs that provided well for the family as a whole, and I was lucky enough to have parents as supportive as them so that I could go to college to pursue my passion.

Through the times of my life where I have needed help or have lost my way, they were always there to provide support and to help ensure that I don't necessarily have to face the same problems they did head-on. It is this sense of continued empowerment that has affected me in trying to pass that support on to my friends and family.

Whenever I envision the idea of an American, I don't see it defined by a race or a certain religion. I don't see minorities or majorities or outcasts. What I see is an individual pushing up against the ways of the past so that they can create a brighter future. I see people who are struggling every day, some harder than others for the same goal. The focus for these struggles are embedded in the sands of tomorrow.