Category: personal AnGoL

Here is a piece from the late great DFW who shows how a great writer can write about anything and still make you think, and feel.
as for the title Let’s just say that I’ve turned down a lot of vacations that I can honestly say I don’t like being a tourist. I went to baguio a month ago with Chuck,Vince and Tonio , and when we were deciding where to go Chuck wanted to go to an uninhabited island whilst I was really pushing towards a real tourist destination. This seems wierd. The fact is what I was trying to do was akin to what I used to do when I was a child and had a tooth that was about to fall off. I just kept moving it feeling the pain but nonetheless still doing it, till the pain becomes enjoyable and suddenly your tooth falls off. I loved going to Baguio, but I can say that any time and any where I am with friends and I can say with a straight face that I do not like tourist’s destinations, they me feeling something that I have failed to bring to life using my meager vocabulary and my ill command of the english language. The words quoted below do justice to my inner conflict with being a tourist. I don’t know I fancy myself as a traveller.

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
Consider the Lobster: 2000s Archive : gourmet.com.

from paolo coelo:

Of course I had never heard of this, so he explained what it was. I continued on my journey and discovered it is hard to find anyone in any of the Scandinavian countries who does not know this law. Although the law exists since the beginning of civilization, it was only officially declared in 1933 by writer Aksel Sandemose in the novel “A refugee goes beyond limits.”
The sad truth is that the Law of Jante is not restricted to Scandinavia: this is a rule applied in every country in the world, despite the fact that Brazilians say that “this only happens here,” and the French claim that “unfortunately, that’s how it is in our country.” Now, the reader must be annoyed because he/she is already half way through the column and still does not know what the Law of Jante is all about, so I’ll try to explain it here briefly in my own words:
“You aren’t worth a thing, nobody is interested in what you think, mediocrity and anonymity are your best bet. If you act this way, you will never have any big problems in life.”
The Law of Jante at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

I believe that people inherently want to be the great, its just that fear stops them from even trying. Whenever anyone haas the courage to try to be really great, to really blaze a trail we are faced with our initial inability to overcome our fear. The existence of someone courageous enough to try rubs our insecurities and inabilities to even try.
Whenever faced with this I tell myself this from here:

Our Greatest Fear —Marianne Williamson
it is our light not our darkness that most frightens us
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.
—Marianne Williamson