Let’s rewind seven years…
I'm speaking with someone who I genuinely admire and respect.
I seem to recall saying, “You know, the pursuit of happiness for the sake of happiness is useless,”
“Of course,” the man of mystery says in response.
I've had a love/hate relationship with the idea of happiness ever since.
Is being "happy," feeling love and joy from an inside sense of self, the same as being "happy," experiencing what I think I desire and what others want from me?
I used to be plagued by these kinds of inquiries constantly, but then a strange thing happened: I discovered a method that the poet John Keats employed to explore concepts. It is known as “Negative Capability.” Here is what it means, according to Britannica.
negative capability, a writer’s ability, “which Shakespeare possessed so enormously,” to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” according to English poet John Keats, who first used the term in an 1817 letter. An author possessing negative capability is objective and emotionally detached, as opposed to one who writes for didactic purposes; a literary work possessing negative capability may have beauties and depths that make conventional considerations of truth and morality irrelevant.
This definition disappoints me personally since it doesn't adequately represent how I perceive the process to be.
Get ready for a mental road trip.
Think of a universe where everything that may exist—physical, non-physical, mathematical, photographic, scientific, and artistic—is present.
In such a world, contradictions between mathematical concepts and the physical world, or between photographic inductive learning and scientific deductive learning, exist inside this intellectual universe. 1
These paradoxes, however, do not prevent one from comprehending this imaginary world. They hold the key.
You see, the recurring challenge in life and the world of ideas isn't with the world of concepts or the world of people and things. It is our perception of goodness, truth, and beauty that is both inherent in people and in all the universes that define existence.2
When I realized this about two years ago, I started to feel happy. because I no longer had to be afraid of creating an ordered internal world without contradictions. It isn’t that the world itself is full of contradictions and problems; I am, and I can grow. I push past my limits and discover new ways of perceiving and living in this beautiful thing called life and existence.
These contradictions inside us are not the problem: our emotions, our moods, our love, and our desires. They are elements of the solution, integral parts of the human experience. When I use negative capability to write a poem, I don’t restrain “conventional considerations of truth and morality,” nor do I become “objective and emotionally detached," but I believe I become attuned to my life experiences past, present, and imaginary.
This way of perceiving things isn’t without problems; it’s vague, ambiguous, subjective, and relativistic. This is why I’m sharing this with the world in the hopes that as it is passed from person to person and mind to mind, it will take on a new form that is less vague, less ambiguous, more objective, and more realistic.
The last few weeks I’ve spent writing poetry online have been some of the happiest of my life so far. Thank you for sharing this journey with me, and I wish you all the best in this thing called life.
My thanks go out to the eleven people who subscribed and to my Twitter friends for their feedback. I only write because people like you read! 🥰
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Another contradiction in this imaginary universe would be between my theoretical and actual shoe sizes. I have wide feet, so I just buy a size up or half a size up rather than look for wide shoes.
As a follow-up to that, here’s an example of different types of perceptions. I don’t have an objectively good shoe size. What I have are objectively good feet that I couldn’t walk without. The ability to walk and run is a joy in and of itself.