I'm obsessed with obsession

On little paradoxes

I’m obsessed with obsession. Sometimes I feel life is like a hopscotch course of obsessions — jumping one square to the next, back again, feeling the highs and lows in my feet and my legs and my bones, sharing these feelings with those who happen to be around, and if I’m lucky with those who choose to be around, slowly learning which way and with whom to jump, then during the occasional crash looking back to discover that none of it was nearly enough, and then choosing to do it again. This seems like the purest form of pleasure, to lose myself in the pursuit of something bigger than myself, to dedicate myself to the craft, it’s almost divine.

I’m obsessed with flying too close to the sun, to burn out like Icarus, or maybe with flying just close enough to stay airborne. The paradoxical idea that to grow, to achieve your full potential, you must allow yourself to be fully immersed, to lose yourself so completely in a person or an idea or a passion that you fall asleep, but that to be conscious you must wake up now and then. How to live a life of striving where I am still in control, where my striving does not define my horizon. How to stay grounded while still letting myself fly.

I’m obsessed with obsessives. Those who lock themselves up, the recluses, those who we idolize as complete devotees to their craft, those who idolize art as holy, godly even, that create for no reason other than they feel they have something that simply must be said, that vomit words or paint or songs from somewhere subconscious, those who burn their work before it can be performed because no earthly rendering of their work can ever be as perfect. Those who see the world not with their eyes but rather within themselves, who dedicate themselves to discovery, those who have the audacity to believe and to act, the scientist that hunkers in their inner world for 6 years to emerge with a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

I’m obsessed with love, requited and unrequited. To project your imperfect inner world onto another imperfect being, and in doing so to create something beautiful, more perfect, less imperfect. To obsess over someone, over someone else’s world, a world you will never really see but rather only read translations of. The beautiful learnings that arise from the little mistranslations. The heat, energy, chaos when inner worlds collide, how they fuse, transmute, create new life. So-called unconditional love, giving without expectation of receiving; is unreciprocated love any less meaningful?

I’m obsessed with when obsession builds and when obsession destroys. With looking back on obsession’s many products and thinking whether I like what I built, with whether I should even do so, with whether the process of obsession is more important than its form, whether the form has any meaning at all. With how some obsessions seem to grow my inner world and some seem to starve it. With how some obsessions feel like a dim pinpoint of distant light, while others surround me. With the love triangle of obsession, passion, and delusion. With how to control my obsessive monkey brain, how to choose my obsessions. How to fall asleep and know I’ll wake up. How to align my obsessions with my life.

I’m obsessed with obsession’s holiness in a godless world. Magical realism. With how the real and the unreal can coexist, with how they can blend into ordinary realism. How to romanticize our little obsessions while still staying grounded in rationalism, reason, science. How do we bring our dreams below the clouds? “Real or fake, that doesn’t really matter. Facts and the truth are two different things.” The gut feeling, system 1 thinking, fate. “Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.”

I’m obsessed with how obsession seems to not be zero-sum. How juggling my obsessions seems to invigorate, to cross-pollinate. How the devoted father seems to have more time, not less. The concept of creative space. The Renaissance man. America’s obsession with depth, the career man, 30 years of experience. How these lie in tension, how both are virtuous in their own way. Falling asleep and waking up. How my lists seem to grow longer, how attaining them in my one life seems to keep getting harder, how my intention then grows ever stronger, and then in a way I become more and more myself.

I’m obsessed with obsession’s climax, epiphany. That moment when the fog clears, the stars align, inexplicably a secret is revealed to you, a secret that changes everything. How I am romantically drawn to this moment, this holy moment, which I have always explained as a love for problem solving but that in reality extends beyond the solving of problems to the divination of ideas, some of which are solutions to problems but all of which are sublime and beautiful. How some words seem pregnant with meaning, how there is beauty in the unsaid. More beauty in that which I discover than that which I am told. How maybe I can’t control when I have epiphanies, but maybe I can choose my obsessions.

I’m obsessed with writing about obsession, which is what I’ll do over the next few weeks.