A Reflection

The quality of being open, honest, and sincere : forthrightness

I’ve time to reflect upon the life that I’ve lived. I’ve only done so for 2 decades. I’ve only made a few mistakes. I only have a small pile of regrets. I doubt the piles can get any smaller. I have also had time to learn. Learn from my own experience and that of the multitudes of lives that I’ve lived.

Candor is a word that I first stumbled upon when I was reading a popular young adult fantasy book series. At that time I thought no much more of it than a synonym for honesty. I instead resonated with erudite. Knowledge was my bastion. A pursuit worthy of time and effort. I would spend my time acquiring what of it I could hold in my head, and desperately attempting to show to others what I had in there.

I want to be right. Again and again. To be the one that people turn to when they would like direction. To be sure of my own choices in a way that few are. I wanted to know. Unfortunately knowledge seldom begets wisdom. It takes more than being told so to realise that people do not listen. People do not change. We are not rational. There is no argument that makes things happen. Not in yourself; not in others. I walked in the shoes of countless people, fictional and otherwise. I never saw this.

Only experience could teach me. I would hide behind rationality. Spend my time thinking through my thoughts. Deducing the sources of my emotions, it would turn experience into an exercise. Who knew that feelings are meant to be felt, not thought through.

Each time that I would be confronted with the simplicities of existence, think love, loss, prejudice, pride. I would build these beautiful soliloquies. Explaining to myself and any ear that care to listen, the depth of my knowledge about these pains. Dispensing advice and suggestions. Every ear these words fell upon were deaf.

freedom from prejudice or malice : fairness

How much time lost? Lost to labyrinths of arguments and justifications. To castles painted in the air, trying to make beautiful that which need only be said. This essay itself manages to do the same. I hope that reach a point. Which I will. A point that is simple, as all truly useful things are.

Now that I have enough dots to connect. I start firstly with the realisation that

1. I have finite time.
2. Everything I love has finite time.

With this in mind, I realise that obtuseness is my vice. To make complex that which is simple is the greatest sin. Complexity gives me a place to hide. I can build oh so many narratives to explain away my worries and mistakes. Up till now I was dumb enough to continue to do so.

I started speaking less. People know what they want to do. They seem to ask when don’t. I don’t need to but in. Never had to. Who noticed however? Once again I was confronted by the same question. Was I changing another part of me for someone else’s gain? Did I hide my judgements for their gain? I suppose now my answer is yes. Each thing that I do has been for someone else. You can never truly be selfish. We don’t move unless acted upon. Would we change were it not the frictions of others lives upon ours? I think not. So now I can be glad of that fact. I like to think that it is a good thing that I can mold myself to be something comfortable. And that is me. Julius from Re-Zero said “should the facsimile not deserve more respect since it must work so much harder in its imitation of the original?”¹ This is something that I’m happy being.

brightness, brilliance

So candor is the thing that I shall choose to pursue. To be clear to all the people that I talk to. To be clear to myself. We have small lives. And we all suck at subtlety. I cannot be bothered wasting time tiptoeing around things that ought be said clearly.

Footnotes

1. A little misquoted to make it fit in the context of my sentence. ↩