I’m writing this entry while waiting for my buddy Jerome at a rainy Portland Airport. Looks like his flight got delayed so I’ll have some time to get back into writing a few words here. Last night I finally beat the evil Dark Ganon in Zelda – the Breath of the Wild, and after what was probably over 60 hours of gameplay I can finally move on with my life! Learning Japanese. Writing. Listening to podcasts. Reading books and magazines. Playing music. It’s amazing how much I can get sucked into a video game – I’m no different than the 8 year old kid I used to be, glued to the screen for hours on end.

I’m here in Portland to take care of pre-nuptial activities and enjoy some good food and libations. I see little kids running around with their smiling parents sipping on coffee nearby. A pianist plays familiar pop and jazz tunes at the Stumptown coffee shop in the middle of the airport. Amidst all the buzz are hundreds of people walking in various directions to their unique destinies for the day.

I wanted to take a moment here to contemplate the next few years. Marriage right around the corner, followed presumably by children. Transitions in business, careers, and goals. We’ll probably get a house someday. Addictions, bad habits, and other things that waste time and money will drop off as they already have been. I suspect all of these things and much more will happen very quickly, and in 5 years I won’t even know what kind of life I once lived at the age of 37. I guess you could say I’m just pausing to enjoy the view before the craziness begins. As my old college homeboy Dan Kwon says, “get everything you want before you marry. you wont’ be able to afterwards.”

I look to my older friends that serve as good examples or cautionary tales. I try to learn from what works and emulate, and try to avoid the failures. One thing I’ve recently been trying to do is to try to practice getting away from my self-centeredness. I realized that the anger of my past, and that the mental/physical damage that I’ve experienced in my youth only helped flame further my sense of justification for me to keep focusing on me.

Recently I had an incident where a friend of mine let himself get drunk, and allowed his true nature to come forth in very inappropriate settings. While it certainly wasn’t his first time (probably won’t be his last), it taught me a few things. During his bout of inebriation, he poured out his frustrations of what he thought was another friend “cockblocking” his attempts to impress an international visitor at a party we were all attending (which ended up not being the case at all). Further, he expressed feelings of deep loneliness, and a prevailing sense of despair at his station in life, comparing what he had to what others had, who others had, that everyone else was moving along in life, leaving him behind, etc. Now, I’d seen this behavior before from this guy, but upon further examination, I found that it was a much deeper issue than met the eye. You see, these kinds of chronic feelings of loneliness and limited capability – these are all thoughts generated by one’s self- no one else. My other cockblocking friend and I were trying to console him that evening, repeatedly trying to encourage him and lift him up – but I noticed that all of these positive words simply fell on ears that adamantly refused to listen. He was clearly craving only the attention, sympathy, and pity of those around him – with the goal of achieving respect and adulation/adoration. It was mentally draining for the both of us, and I sacrificed what was supposed to be a pleasant evening with my fiancee to console this guy.

But I had to think that these feelings of self-limitation and desire for adoration had to come from somewhere. I believe that we are all self-centered beings by design, all landing somewhere between a wide spectrum of intensity in self-centeredness. It seems that when people say they’ve been through “shit,” that said “shit” is oftentimes a construct of their own creation in their minds. Even when it’s external to them, people tend to use the “I’m a victim of a lot of bad shit” as an excuse to be focused on themselves even more, and justify further a self-centeredness that was already there in the first place – only amplified by their bad experiences. I also believe that the more we indulge this focus on one’s self, the more doors open for disappointed expectations, misguided intentions, and a lot of other kinds of ugliness. I witnessed that evening a man who had lived deep in this self-centeredness for most of his life. I had seen it destroy his relationships and friendships, and ultimately his own confidence in himself. Ironically it was this sense of trying to hold onto everything that caused him to lose things one by one. This insufferable desire to be respected and adored was all driven by the focus on one’s own self, and here he was this evening, falsely accusing another friend of getting in the way of trying to win the affections of a girl that was in reality creeped out by his untoward drunken advances that evening.

My hypothesis? It comes down to the innate sense of self-centeredness we all struggle with. I think that if we get away from selfish behavior, it makes for the building of pathways to greater relationships of love, LIFE, and real happiness. It seems to be a general trend in what I see, if I were to do a regression model as my marketing buddies would say.

The next few years in my life are critical. I’m about to merge my life with another’s and create a family. I can’t come to it with self-centeredness or I will invariably end up like my inebriated friend. This is my focus for the balance of the year, to try to see things in this kind of light- to get away from always thinking about myself. I think it makes for a generally better, fun, and honestly a more chill time.

And now, Jerome’s flight is almost here. I’d better go get some more coffee.

🙂