Seeking Clarity

Have you ever thought about what makes being human so complicated and just downright exhausting? Sometimes, I really wonder why things can never be clear cut.

Animals know they need to survive. They seek and acquire nourishment and protection to the best of their ability no matter what stands in their way. There is one goal - to survive.

Our human complexity, on the other hand, is something that prevents any choices we make from being so simple. We seem to be unsatisfied. Once we have a comfortable life (with no urgently fatal threat to our health or well being) , we climb a ladder of increasing necessities. We have life, but then we wish to live a life with value and meaning. Next thing you know, we are chasing various goals that become so far removed from our base desire to continue living that, at least in my opinion, they disturb the understanding and grasp we were thought to previously possess over our lives - things start to get confusing. I don't know if one could classify these secondary goals as facets of the larger goal - to live with purpose and meaning but I am sure they all stem from the same origin. I guess what I am trying to say with all of this is that sometimes I can't help but wish things were a little simpler.

It's the start of senior year and I will not lie to you, I am terrified out of my mind and overwhelmed - what I signed up for this year feels quite out of my league. And that's one of my biggest flaws I think, an inability to handle ambiguity. Right now, nothing is clear. I have all of these goals but I also have no solid reason to believe that I will achieve any of them. I want to be a doctor but no school has accepted me to show that I can do such a thing. I want to write a thesis paper on C. Elegans but I have no substantiation that I am capable of doing it correctly. I want to make my teachers and my family and all those who have invested time and effort into helping me grow proud but I have no control over how colleges view my application or how each of these stakeholders classify success. There is always a chance that the odds will be against me, but until I know for sure how everything will turn out, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to actually try arriving at these goals.

The need to survive in a human sense, is shaping up to have a very different meaning than surviving in an animal sense. Maybe I've just been spending too much time comparing nematodes to humans but what I've realized is that the most beautiful, but also the potentially most destructive thing about us is that we don't only seek to survive - we desire to thrive. While the desire to thrive can give us the most full of lives, it can also ruin us by its implicit anxiety and obscurity.

So much happened in the first three days of school that I lost track, suddenly everything came crashing down when it didn't need to. A thesis needs patience and moderation, and the ability to work little by little, all of which I will have to learn. I want to thrive in any situation I'm put in, I am human after all. But sometimes, perspective is lost and I start seeking that easy-way-out clarity. I try to make things black-and-white when they aren't because, well, we aren't. No matter how much I naively distort my perception of reality though, there is no escape from the fact that humans are complicated. And I don't just mean biologically complicated (come take SUPA Bio, you'll find out exactly what I mean). I mean that we are complicated in our relationships to others, our responsibilities, our abilities, etc. and we have to take all of these things into account before making any decision or taking a step in any one direction. It's like algebra, but instead of 2 or 3 unknowns, we've got multitudes.

I don't have much worm news or really much of anything to tell you besides this profoundly basic realization: humans are complicated, and being one absolutely exhausts me.