Tag: identity

On Attachment:

Why are we so afraid of attachment?

mikegiorgi8 Comments

“Don’t do it,” my cousin warned. “Don’t get attached.”

I laughed at him. He obviously didn’t have to worry about that.

But my laugh didn’t seem to convince him.

“You have no idea who she is – she could be crazy.” His warnings continued.

Valid point, I thought. I hardly knew her.

I had met her only a week previous, on the night of her birthday.

The mood was festive. Her sister was visiting and her friends were with her. The weather was perfect. Anyone could be a pleasure to be around in such a perfect setting.

“You could get hurt.”

I hated to admit it, but that one struck a chord.

He’s right, I thought, I could get hurt.

But sometimes we can’t shake the feeling that it doesn’t matter.

Sometimes we just can’t shake the feeling that we’ve found someone that we want to be attached to.

So when did we start to correlate suffering with attachment?

It’s a thought that sort of worked it’s way into the western mentality from its distant origins in the east.

The idea of dis-attachment is nothing new. Various Buddhist and Hindu sects have always determined attachment to be a major source of human suffering.

Attachment is the origin, the root of suffering; hence it is the cause of suffering.” The Dalai Lama at Harvard, 1988.

A very superficial understanding of the concept has worked its way into our psyche.

We see attachment as a bad thing.

It means opening up to the chance of losing something.

It means being vulnerable.

It means falling in love with a person who could take that love away from us at any time.

It means getting hurt.

But how much truth is there to this simple understanding of attachment?

I look around me, and I see that attachment makes up the very foundation of life.

On a purely molecular level, hydrogen molecules attach themselves to oxygen to form water – the elixir which makes life possible.

The biological attachment of man to woman creates life, and the attachment of a mother to her child is what allows that child to survive infancy – as her mother cares for the child out of that attachment.

The tides of our oceans are intricately attached to the gravitational pull of our moon, which in turn is attached to the pull of the earth, which spins happily in its attachment to the sun and our solar system.

The bloom of the African lilly is forever attached to the spring for the perfect conditions, the bees for its pollination, and the sun for it’s nurturing kiss.

In an infinitely interconnected universe, attachment is creation.

Attachment is life.

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Starlight over the Rhone Near Arles [1888] by Vincent Van Gogh.
And yet attachment can be a dangerous thing.

It is when our attachments are based on reliance that it has a high propensity to cause suffering.

It is when we fill the void inside of ourselves with attachment that those attachments gain the power to hurt us.

It is when we attach ourselves to the love of others rather than the love of ourselves that our attachments become toxic.

It is when we attach ourselves to the acceptance of our peers rather than ourselves that our characters become weak and dependant.

Someone close to me always says that you have to fill your own cup. It is when our attachments fill our cups that they become dangerous, because at any moment we may lose them.

This leads to cycles of loss and gain, unbalanced relationships of power and reliance, and, for the most part, pain.

That is the lesson of the west, the lesson of the Buddhists and the Hindus. We mustn’t attach ourselves to sources of love and happiness that we should be getting from our own heart and souls.

But fearing attachments because we may lose them is only weakness.

It is a fear of loss.

It is a fear of being hurt.

It is a fear of not being worthy.

But we are worthy of love.

We are worthy of acceptance.

We are worthy of real, committed relationships.

Allowing ourselves to become attached is one of the greatest forms of vulnerability that we can demonstrate to each other.

The more attachments we have, the more we’ll lose.

The more we’ll suffer.

But that pain is the price we pay to live life to the fullest.

To avoid pain and live life in solitude is the life of a monk.

It is the absence of vulnerability, and it is the absence of the awe and wonder our indulgence in this human experience provides us.

It is human to be vulnerable.

It is human to attach.

The vulnerability that we demonstrate in attaching ourselves to another forces us to dive deeper into ourselves.

It is an essential journey into finding out all the intricate details about ourselves – the good, the (not so) bad, and the things we need to work on that we would have never noticed otherwise.

But finally, it teaches us acceptance.

It teaches us to accept ourselves as perfect just the way we are.

It teaches us to accept another as just as perfect.

It teaches us to accept that we may lose that person or thing at any moment, and that’s okay.

In fact, it makes that person or that thing even more valuable and beautiful because we may lose them tomorrow.

In the acceptance of eventual loss we find appreciation.

We find gratitude.

We’re not perfect. We never will be.

We will struggle to reach that higher place of existence for the rest of our lives.

But we can learn to be happy by ourselves.

We can learn to love and accept ourselves.

And along the way, when we get that undeniable feeling that we’ve found someone we want to attach ourselves to, we’ll be absolutely fearless when we do it.

Be good to each other,

– MG.

On Judgement:

The only way of truly knowing anyone or anything, is to get to know them.

mikegiorgi14 Comments

The rain was splattering heavily against the bus window. I couldn’t hear it over the pod cast I was listening to, but the visuals were just as calming.

The bus was unusually crowded for the time of day, and I happened to be one of the few people without a person wedged into the seat beside me.

But alas, my personal freedom was not meant to be.

An elderly gentlemen stepped onto the bus, closed his umbrella, and shook it dry. He dusted off the sleeves and fixed the cuffs of his brown suit that he could have stolen from the set of Mad Men.

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Mad Men: An accurate depiction of the old man’s suit.

He spotted the seat next to me and made his leisurely advance toward it.

As he walked toward me, a million suggestions about him flooded my head before he got to my seat. Out of touch. Senile. Grumpy. Bitter. Lonely.

In short, I believed from the moment I saw him that he had nothing in common with me.

I tried to smile at him when our eyes met, but the scowl on his face appeared to be a permanent fixture. Cranky old man, I thought to myself.

He wiggled in his seat as though he was jostling for position. I tried to show him with my body language that I couldn’t move over any more than I already was. We weren’t off to the best start.

I tried to keep my gaze outside of the window, but the man kept fidgeting. I tried to ignore him, but I couldn’t.

I eventually checked to see what he was doing. He was pulling out a book. I was surprised to see it was Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan (…..Canadian!).

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Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan

The nerd in me couldn’t help but remove my headphones and tell the man that was my favourite book from all of my undergraduate history studies. As I began a one-way conversation about some of my favourite points, he looked at me almost bewildered.

I instantly recognized that look of surprise, and that’s when it hit me.

He had judged me in the same way I had judged him.

I thought of how I must have looked to him when he first saw me. I was in gym gear, with long hair, a beard, drinking a shake, and with my headphones on.

I look at myself sometimes and think I look more like I belong at the battle of Thermopylae than I do in a law classroom. It was comical to imagine how he saw me.

spartans-what-is-your-profession
A scene from the movie 300: “Spartans, what is your profession?”

To him, I was probably just a young punk who knew it all. I was probably listening to hip-hop or whatever “kids these days” find appealing. I was probably off to “do my exercises” so that I could better “chase all the girls.” I probably even smoked those “marijuana cigarettes.”

And who could blame him? With how I looked, it might have been a stretch for him to guess that I was actually listening to a podcast on the third Punic War, heading for a quick workout so I wouldn’t go stir crazy studying for law exams.

We talked about the book and our favourite personalities of the first world war. Our talks on the first world war quickly became talks about the second. We talked about our relatives who lived through it.

He found out I was a Canadian, and told me about his travels to Ottawa and Toronto. We talked about my travels in Australia.

It also turned out he was a professor of History. We compared our favourite Roman generals. We talked of famous victories and disastrous defeats. It may be nerd speak to some, but we were connecting through a mutual passion.

When he got on the bus, I had immediately assumed that this was a man I had nothing in common with. It’s safe to conclude he had assumed the same. Yet here we were, finding common ground at every turn. He reminded me of my grandfathers, and the passion they instilled in me for life.

I almost missed my stop because we were in such deep conversation. I found I was legitimately upset to part with my new friend. We said our goodbyes and I left with a deeper faith in our connectedness as humans.

I say, sir, that you can never make an intelligent judgement without evidence.” – Malcom X, The Playboy Interview.

We say it all the time – not to judge a book by its cover – but this experience took it a step further for me. I don’t think its at all possible to judge a book by its cover.

We really have no idea who a person is until we dive into their world.

We can only judge the mask they show to us. We can judge the trends they support, but we can’t judge them.

We have no idea if it’s Beethoven or Drake playing through those headphones. And, even if we did know, what does that really tell us about a person?

The more obsessed we’ve become over our own appearances, the more judgemental we become of the appearances of others.

The only way of truly knowing anyone or anything, is to get to know them.

Imagine a world the same as ours, except the moment someone felt the need to judge someone they instead took a moment to connect with a fellow human being.

What a world that would be.

Be good to each other,

– MG.

On Social Media:

Don’t we think it’s a little strange that, in a world of nearly seven and a half billion (7 383 900 000) people, so many of us feel like we’re all alone?

mikegiorgi14 Comments

I’ve always found the term “social media” to be a curious one. 

Admittedly, if you break the word down into its respective body parts – “social” and “media” – it’s a word that makes perfect sense. Yet it’s not its pieces that make it a puzzle. 

The term feels like a misnomer. It doesn’t feel right. I look at social media and I fail to see anything social about it.

Media is not an inherently social entity. From newspapers to Fox News, there is no social interaction actually involved. 

We may feel as though we’re socially interacting. Like we’re connecting with that horoscope columnist who just really seems to “get” us, or the newscaster covering our sports team who seems to always agree with our opinion of the new head coach.

Ron Burgundy: One of the Only News Anchors to Truly Understand Us, San Francisco. [Image Credit: Anchorman]
Ron Burgundy: One of the Only News Anchors to Truly Understand Us, San Francisco.
[Image Credit: Anchorman]

But we’re not.

We’re still sitting alone at the kitchen table, keeping our eyes on the newspaper while we hurriedly force down the coffee we burnt before work.

We’re still messily finishing that crossword on the train with the stranger in a brown suit next to us as our only companion. And no, it doesn’t count as social interaction because we asked him for a four-lettered word for a famous son of Chronos.

The media doesn’t want to interact with us. It wants us to read, to listen, and to watch their version of what’s happening all around you. It wants to tell us what perception of reality to accept. 

Social media, in turn, has taken us one slippery step further down this path of human isolation.

Social media has stolen from us our innate love of society; we have never been more antisocial than we are this very moment.

There was a time, before bullet trains and water spraying jet packs (which are pretty awesome for the record), when our nearest neighbours were fifteen kilometres away and the fastest method of travelling was on horseback. Yet we called on each other weekly, if not daily, to fulfil that natural desire to truly interact with other human beings.

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”  – Aristotle, The Politics.

Fast forward to today, and I haven’t called on my neighbour since before the first Jurassic Park movie came out.

Social media has negatively affected every (formerly) social activity.

I see us capturing moments – beautiful sunrises and breathtaking full moons – through Instagram filters instead of capturing them with our eyes and keeping them in our souls.

We write those moments as Snapchat stories instead of writing them across our hearts, as part of our own stories that are constantly unfolding.

We use the check in button on Facebook to let our friends know where we are and what we’re doing, instead of checking in with a call or catching up with a visit.

We’ve mastered messaging with “abreeves” but forgotten how to carry a face-to-face conversation.

We live tweet sports events from our couch instead of taking a road trip to catch a live sporting event with some friends.

We text acquaintances while we sit around a table with our actual friends.

We don’t notice the love of our life next to us in the cafe because our eyes are down on our phone as we try to find love on Tinder. They walk in and out of our lives while we’re swiping right and left.

We’ve exchanged real friends for followers and lovers for “matches.”

And yet, don’t we think it’s a little strange that, in a world of nearly seven and a half billion (7 383 900 000) people, so many of us feel like we’re alone?

It’s because we are alone. Every social media platform offers an additional layer to a wall we’re building between ourselves and those around us. Another filter. More paint on our masks.

We’re given the means to limit and skew the images of ourselves that we put out there, and everyone else is doing the same. It becomes a terrifying idea to show people who we really are, so we don’t. Everyone tries to be like everyone else.

We’re creating a world where no one will truly know anyone.

I think that’s a tragic thing, because the greatest protectors of the beautiful uniqueness and natural individuality we possess as humans should be all of us, together.

Governments and, further back, religions have always feared and denounced the individual; the threat to the status quo. 

And yet, individuals such as Copernicus, da Vinci, Tesla, Picasso, and Einstein did amazing things by questioning that same status quo, by letting their unique thoughts and feelings be their compass. 

They didn’t follow tradition, and we celebrated them for it.

Self-Portrait (1512) by Leonardo da Vinci.
Self-Portrait (1512) by Leonardo da Vinci.

I’m afraid we’re starting to lose that. We’re falling into line.

Not because of fear or oppression – those things could never break our powerful spirit – but because of distraction.

The irony of it all is that I’m communicating this via an outlet that was only born in the age of social media, and sharing it on multiple social media platforms.

I think our advances in technology and our ability to connect with one another is astounding. 

I’m thankful for Skype, Instagram, and other means of keeping in touch with all of those that I love and miss at home.

I just think it’s important that in our quest to be more connected, we don’t severe our connection to each other; that we don’t become the snake that eats its own tail.

Recognize each other. Appreciate someone when they do something differently, wear something strange, or embrace their authentic self in any way at all. 

You’ll find people start encouraging you to do the same.

And, my God, that will be a beautiful thing.

Be good to each other,

– MG

On The Comparison of Suffering:

Isn’t it enough to know we’re all in this together?

mikegiorgi9 Comments

The suffering of humanity is inescapable.

Everywhere we look, we see each other in pain. Flicking through a newspaper or television channels, we can regularly find a striking example of someone bearing one of the many crosses we are forced to carry in our lifetime.

None of us can escape the suffering that is the human experience. Our lives will be defined by those struggles which we have found the strength to overcome. All of us the phoenix, our individual suffering our ashes.

And yet we insist on turning these struggles into an issue of race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, or culture. We relate to these issues not as humans, but as a colour of skin, a possessor of certain genitalia, a sexual preference, a place in society, or a zealot of a certain God or Goddess.

We continue to break ourselves apart into smaller and smaller pieces until we fit into tiny, exclusive boxes. We are a black, upper-class, Protestant, heterosexual female. We are a white, blue-collared, atheist, homosexual male.

We restrict our empathy when we latch onto these exclusive groups; they become the only ones who can understand the vastness our individual suffering.

Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Eugène Delacroix: We will unite (and separate) under flags, skin colour, religion, and sexuality - but not our suffering.
Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Eugène Delacroix: We will unite (and separate) under flags; we will unite under the banner of skin colour, religion, sex, and sexuality – but not our suffering.

We live in an age where we are surrounded by comparison and competition and, whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’ve started to live for it. We revel in it. We waste so much time in our self-comparison with others that giant online industries such as Facebook and Instagram were partially founded – and partially depend – upon it. The desire to compare our lives has literally become a multimillion dollar industry. Even our suffering – unique to our own journey – has not escaped our thirst for comparison and competition.

The problem does not lie in our desire for comparison. Our lives are inherently different from one another, and comparing differences in ourselves provides a means of recognizing and accepting one another despite our superficial differences.

There is also nothing inherently evil in a thirst for competition. I think of the teachings of various martial arts which insist on competition being a vital aspect on the path to self-awareness, self-respect, and personal growth.

Comparison and competition become issues when they are applied to our individual suffering. It arises when we invest in the idea that our suffering is somehow greater and more valid than the suffering of others.

This notion segregates us. It divides and ranks us based on an assumption we do not have the power to confirm or deny – unless someone eventually learns how to experience the lives of two different people, with different issues, simultaneously in order to compare them.

Who’s to say those of us who were born without fathers – whether we’ve lost them to death, jail, or another marriage – suffer more acutely than those who grow up with fathers who leave for work before the sun rises and come home after their bedtime, the fathers who are never around? The suffering for each is rooted in the same longing for paternal affection. Both examples are kids who just wish they could throw the ball around with their pops.

Father and Son (2008) by Bahram Gonche pour: To any young boy, is there really a difference between losing a father and being separated constantly from one?
Father and Son (2008) by Bahram Gonche pour: To a young boy, is there really a difference between losing a father and constantly being separate from one?

The examples are endless. Who are we to assume those that have lost a spouse to cancer suffer more deeply than those who have lost theirs to infidelity? That the little brother who loses his big brother to drugs suffers more than the little sister who loses her older sister to the popular group in college?

That the pressure to be of a certain sexuality is more excruciating than the pressure to pursue a traditional career? Both are instances of the person being pressured to live unhappily in a lie in order to please others. Both people are too terrified of social or parental judgements to be true to themselves. Both have somehow been convinced that who they are as a person is wrong.

We could spend an unlimited amount of energy arguing for one case or the other, but it is this exact determination to separate and rank our suffering that is driving us apart.

Instead of a division of suffering, I see the gay male – afraid to come out to his orthodox Christian parents – and the daughter of two Harvard law graduates – who wants to be an artist instead of a lawyer – as two people who are fighting the same battle of identity. I see two people struggling, in different ways, with who they are and the expectations about who they “should” be. I see two people who can show compassion and empathy for one another and who can unite in their suffering under a common thread.

The truth is we don’t know if our suffering is any greater or less than any one else, because it is not in our capacity to understand suffering that we do not know intimately ourselves. Our individual experience and perception only leads to assumption.

The truth is, we all have a different observable universe and our individual suffering is unique to our own story. Our suffering is different, yes, but it can never be assumed that we know what those differences feel like. We certainly cannot presume to know how those differences rank, no matter how obvious it seems.

It’s not about the differences themselves. It’s about the acceptance of those differences. It’s about doing our best to understand those differences. It’s about mutual respect. It’s about loving one another.

Every life history is the history of suffering.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains – Volume 3.

The one thing we know for sure is that we all are suffering. We suffer through battles with our identity, image, ego, and our place in the world. We all suffer heartbreak. We all struggle with self-love and acceptance. We suffer through unhappiness and the restlessness of our spirits. We’ve lost loved ones and lovers. We’ve felt alone and unworthy.

Why then, must we compare this suffering? Isn’t it enough to know that every person we pass in the street is fighting a battle of their own? Isn’t it enough to know we’re all in this together? Suffering is the one thing that connects us all.

To be human is to suffer. Instead of using our suffering to separate and rank us, let it unite us. There is no “I”, “me”, or “you.”

There is only “us”.

Be good to each other,

– MG.

On Relationships:

mikegiorgi19 Comments

From the time we’re children, we’re taught by society that we aren’t good enough. By the time we reach young adulthood, we try to paint over the people we are with the brushes society suggests for us. We ignore who we’re meant to be by wearing the hats of the people we believe we’re supposed to be. We eventually forget who we are.

The modern culture of romance, or “dating culture”, is the result of the complete lack of importance placed on the vast substance inherent in our own humanity. We spend our days painting beautiful masks of ourselves and spend our nights wearing them out to down town masquerades.

Every weekend is our carnival, every club is our Venice. With all of us dressed in the height of fashion and wearing the dreamiest of disguises, we’re content to dance our youthful years away.

We paint our masks with the simple stripes of the surface. We think of ourselves, and others, as white or black, male or female, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim. We continue to identify with our surface and mistake it for who we are, when the two are not exclusively connected.

We’ve traded complexity for simplicity. With all of us exchanging our identity for identical illusions, we have slowly rendered ourselves interchangeable. All of our masks look the same.

We build sand castles in the path of crashing waves. We find beautiful partners and we dance the nights away. Sometimes our dance partners stay the night and maybe even for breakfast. Sometimes, we share a second dance. On extremely rare occasions, we find their outer shells so shiny and sparkly that they capture our attention for an entire handful of dances.

These dances last long enough to facilitate relationship status changes on our Facebook and inspire overwhelmingly cute Instagram photos of our morning snuggle and romantic gestures. We do everything and go everywhere with this person. We’ve found the one we want to save our last dance for. We’re totally and completely in love.

The Lovers I (1928) by Rene Magritte
The Lovers I (1928) by Rene Magritte

And then our surfaces begin to erode. They become difficult to maintain. We struggle to keep up the act. Our polished smiles and filtered personalities begin to crack. The weeds from our overgrown interiors begin to force their way through those cracks. We’re confused, and so are they.

We thought we had already shown one another our true selves when we let them see us in sweat pants or without make-up on. They smelled our morning breath. They caught us with food stuck in our teeth. One time, we even farted in front of them.

Our own shallow notions of ourselves had us equating who we are as people with what our natural surfaces used to look like, before we painted them with water colours and doused them in exotic smelling oils.

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Are the cracks starting to show in your mask?

But there’s an entire other world inside of us. It’s full of scars, dreams, mistakes, passions, light, and darkness. It’s a place we’ve ignored while we focused on our appearance, on the character we’re acting as. That place of substance deep inside of us – that place which makes us different and beautiful – provides a journey that would never truly end if our loved ones were to explore it.

But that place scares us. It scares us because we’ve never explored it ourselves. It scares us because we have no idea who we are.

It becomes a terrifying prospect to open this place up to the person we think we love. It’s our own little house of horrors. Even if we did muster the courage to ask them to come inside, how can we expect someone to want to see us for who we are when we can’t even stand the thought of it ourselves? The fact that our significant other is also probably feeling the same personal insecurities only exasperates the situation. The situation becomes unstable because both partners have awoken a deep-seeded self-hatred.

We begin to miss someone loving us for the surface appearance that we’ve spent so much time perfecting. We long to feel that superficial attention and shallow admiration again. We return to the masquerades.

We prefer to spend our time there, hiding behind our masks and having them admired by similarly veiled strangers. We begin to look a little too long at new potential dance partners, with shiny new faces that haven’t eroded like those belonging to our significant others.

We’re bored with what we have at home, because surfaces are simple. There is no journey for us to go on.

That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending – performing. You get to love your pretence….the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are.”― Jim Morrison, 1981 Creem Magazine interview with Lizzie James.

Eventually one (or both) of the partners will realize how difficult it will be to excavate our identities with the appropriate teams of spiritual archaeologists. The road toward self-love has become long and treacherous. We decide a quick reset is much easier.

Being with another person is no place to hide from ourselves, after all. It becomes a race to see who can come up with the perfect wording for whatever arbitrary excuse we’ll use to break up. We’ll call it “losing our spark”, “growing apart”, or “not being happy”.

We’ll break up, get a gym membership, and work on painting over the tiny cracks left from the waltz that lasted a tad too long. We’ll return to the carnival and, thus, the cycle is born anew. We’ll swear off the opposite sex, and then love itself – as though they were the core issues rather than our festering self-loathing.

Eventually that human desire to share ourselves with another will overwhelm us again, at which point we’ll put on our glass slippers, head to the ball, and once again spiral out of control toward midnight.

I’m not saying to ignore your surface, or that it’s not important. I believe the maintenance and development of your body is just as important as your mind and your soul. I believe in balance. Try to indulge in an ignored inner passion.

It makes no difference if that includes cooking, playing an instrument you suck at, or listening to old Led Zeppelin records, as long as it fuels your soul. Read a chapter or two of an old, classic novel while you’re on the stationary bike doing fasted cardio instead of reading your texts. Work a little bit every day on that part of you that we can’t see, that part of you we’ll never be capable of fully exploring. Work on remembering who you really are.

Show me your beautiful and meticulous surface, and I’ll admire it. It might even lure me close enough to share a dance. But if that’s all you have to offer, it’s a dead end. It’s boring, and I’m out. Show me that endless inner garden that you’ve grown, maintained, and explored for yourself, and I’m in.

Take me by the hand and let’s explore one other. Like two children on a magical adventure, I don’t care how much time we spend in there. You’ll have my interest and wonderment forever.

Be good to each other,

– MG.

Photos Courtesy of:

Venetian Mask: 7-themes.com