[NOTE: my typewriter broke. I use that thing daily to free-write a page or more. Without it, I am using this space to do my free-writing. What appears below is not meant for other readers, and is supposed to be a rambling inquiry into the nature of existence, defining the human experience, or even just ranting. Fortunately, I despise the interface with the WordPress Blogging system, so there won’t be any more of these in the future. I’ll confine them to something easier to use and interact with.
Still, it’s already here and I’m going to click the “Publish” button. But, if you’re expecting what I usually write here, you’re not going to find it.]
The Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone is a band around the Earth from about 5-degrees north to 5-degrees south of the equator. Abbreviated as ITCZ, it is often called “The Itch” by sailors. That is because this part of the Earth is closest to the sun, and the air heats more rapidly there and rises. As it rises it cools, falling back down outside the Itch, creating many of the trade-winds used when sails were the main source of intercontinental travel.
But inside the Itch all that rising air creates calms, and sailors can be stuck for weeks on end trying to fill their sails with the calm, windless air. Back when sail power got people around the world, there were far fewer college graduates trying to sound important by creating a new acronym, so the sailors themselves named this area, calling it the Doldrums.
The word “dol” comes from Old English and was clipped off of a Latin word that meant “sorrowful.” There’s no solid indicator how “doldrum” came about. It could be “dull” and “tantrum” smooshed together, like an intense, dull period. “Humdrum” is an older word though, so it could be modeled after it. You have to have a stronger interest in word etymology than I do to really fall down that rabbit hole.
The important thing is that the the area called the Doldrums were named after the word already existed, and was used originally to express a period of inactivity and listlessness. Chances are high you and everyone you know has “been in the doldrums” at some point, since it isn’t just a nautical term. These periods can have no warning when they begin and no end is ever in sight while you are in them.
I go through these periods frequently, and roughly January to March is the time I expect them to be most prevalent. This year is proving to offer more of the same. San Felipe, Baja California, Mexico, is a small town. Small towns are slow-moving places, like the calm air in the Doldrums.
San Felipe has over 17,000 inhabitants, so it isn’t exactly podunk, but it has very little industry beyond tourism and fishing, mostly done in small boats called pangas. This is also the low-period for tourism in the area, so a lot of doors are closed, and the ones that are open are full of empty seats.
It really wouldn’t matter though if I were here or in an urban jungle with millions of people. There would be more distractions and diversions, and more to look at if you stared out the window, but the doldrums are not about your geographic location…they’re about where you are in your life, and in your mind.
Down here though, I am essentially retired. The disability I get from the VA can cover normal expenses and still allow for a healthy taco habit. While I only need to take the occasional odd job when I’m in the US, it still means I have to budget carefully and look ahead for work opportunities, and take on jobs when they arise in case there’s a dry spell when I need them.
For me, boredom leads to drinking (and this pseudo-retirement is very much a recipe for boredom), so I’ve had to put the ol’ kibosh on that. Well, boredom drinking that is: there’s nothing wrong with a beer or two with some tacos. Without a literally mind-numbing time-killer like drinking, you quickly free up more hours in the day than you need.
I also don’t have a garage or workshop to tinker on my various projects, a band to rehearse with, a race team to manage, or a circle of friends to go riding with. The only thing I have to do all day is work on my book, which isn’t something I want to put 40+ hours a week into.
And so, the doldrums.
Travel doesn’t entirely prevent them, but there is plenty to do when you’re wandering aimlessly. There is routing and navigating, budgeting, setting up and tearing down camp, grabbing groceries nearly daily, and there is more frequent maintenance on the motorcycle, your camping gear, and even your clothes.
Everything becomes monotonous though; some lifestyles just bring it on quicker than others. And that brings me to the other words that are swimming through my head: purpose and meaning. They are familiar terms for me based on my own personal inquiries.
Meaning and what it means
Meaning is a special one because most people don’t truly understand it. In fact, my own pet theory on why the internet is such a hellscape is because of people’s fundamental misunderstanding of meaning. See, meaning does not exist outside the human mind, and if it’s created in the individual, meaning will vary by the individual.
If something you find deeply meaningful is not considered important to another person, they can quickly get labeled “wrong” or — worse yet — “stupid” or “ignorant.” Poof: you have all the ingredients for an argument where the two sides are arguing different things, which is the perfect recipe for finding no common ground. It is the most useless type of argument I’ve encountered, and the internet is a factory for them.
Treating meaning as something we all create actually gives meaning less meaning, ya followin’ me? It’s a bit different than saying people’s opinions aren’t important, as strongly held opinions are more than opinions. You can call them beliefs, but if you study philosophy you’ll learn about a priori reality, which basically means the parts of life that don’t need to be questioned.
The hellscape of the internet and distortions of reality
Up is up and Down is down. Single people are unmarried. People enter rooms through doorways. These are a priori: you don’t need to question them. If you’re good at self-reflection and are truly a student of the world, you can pick any hot-button issue and see how people are using their feelings to create deep meaning, making an a priori reality that isn’t really one, where there is no space for differing opinions. Not a good way to find mutual understanding…
It’s a real pain to catch yourself when you’re doing it. It requires you to consider the opinions of other people in a detached way, and nearly always you will find them coming from an emotion-based place that ignores inconvenient facts. That will quickly get you feeling like the smartest person in the room, which will lead inexorably to smugness, and your own comfortable position of ignorance: your own false a priori reality.
If you’re examining people’s arguments rationally, constantly seeing their refusal to consider inconvenient facts, it’s going to make you uninterested in listening to anyone’s arguments; truly it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
More on meaning and purpose
All of this is a digression from the concept of meaning though. If meaning is generated from within, we are the makers of meaning. If nothing has any meaning, it’s us failing to ascribe meaning — not an absence of meaning. In the search for meaning, we often get it wrong, or we get it right but time changes things, and their importance changes, which changes the meaning of things.
Right now nothing has any meaning for me. The book is ostensibly what I’m doing down here, but it really has no meaning other than what I give it. It doesn’t exist now, so the world will be no different if I never publish it.
So, with little meaning, there is little passion. That moves the conversation to purpose. I use the term as a long-term version of meaning. It’s a meaning that is so strong it becomes an anchor point, or a sort of baseline that we see other things from. Purpose often comes to us through our work or our dedication to family, or even our hobbies, which can be engaged with passionately. If nothing has meaning, there will be a dearth of passion and an unlikeliness of purpose.
That certainly sounds like a recipe for the doldrums, and here I am. There are dishes to wash, counters to clean, and sometimes groceries to get or laundry to do. That is normally the side-work of living life, and is poor fodder for the central theme of anyone’s existence. Surely, being back on the road will be a salve for the doldrums. Hell, it’s a solve for the doldrums in the early phases of a big trip.
Once you’re back on the road everything is new again, but seeing new things everyday becomes old as well (counterintuitive, but true). Still, meaning, purpose, and passion all remain questions, floating in the æther. This is evidenced for me because I am planning my travels for this year. I have little engagement because I haven’t found a meaning. While travel can be considered a passion of mine, I am engaging with all things in a listless way, and just don’t feel passionate about it.
Doing things for the sake of doing them is something I’m familiar with, but it hasn’t been the “solve” for me lately. I did a lot of my racing as a pursuit of doing a cool thing so that cool things existed in the world, and I was part of creating them in my own small way. But that too is old now. Suddenly I realize why women have that weird need to rearrange all the furniture in the house for what seems like no reason. Rearrange what’s there for a fresh take on what has become stale…makes sense.
Back to meaning though. I know meaning is generated from within, so why not just generate some meaning? Make things mean something, and engage passionately with what has meaning to me. Well of course, this is easier said than done. When we do it, we find meaning in a natural way, so much so that we think meaning is outside of us. Knowing it comes from within does not give us access to whatever well we generate it from.
And what does all this meaning, mean…
And so all this to be back at the start of my inquiry. The doldrums. Accepting what is and is not is a great way to approach the world if you appreciate an honest view of the world, which I do. But of course, when things aren’t as we want them, there is a duty to change what we can after we accept what is and is not.
How? Great question, but I’m not writing a self-help book here with a 10-tiered pyramid to happiness© or some other garbage. I don’t have the answer. This is a personal inquiry. I wouldn’t be writing about this if I had the answer, because I wouldn’t be in the doldrums. One obvious solution is to just do anything, even if it’s wrong, because it’s still a step in any direction.
The universe favors change, so taking action can be seen as better than inaction in that sense. That is still analogous to reaching out in the dark, feeling through the void for anything to hold onto. In my past experiences, doing that that has led to interacting with the wrong people, and wasting time on trivial pursuits. But inaction is more of a waste than the wrong action. Well, in the context of the doldrums at least: there are many a lost soul who perished in a survival situation by wasting energy on the wrong thing.
Aligning the sights
The obvious question (and one I’ve asked a dozen times so far) is, “well, what are you already passionate about?” But here’s the problem:
- Writing: writing commercially is not the same as writing for pleasure. Things like keyword stuffing and SEO make writing for pay a very mechanical and unrewarding process. Creating a passion-project involving writing is a thought, but I’m already treating the book I’m writing as a passion project. There isn’t really room for more, beyond the free-writing I already do every day.
- Racing: I can’t say I’d never do it again, but it has run its course for now. It became an unhealthy addiction in the end and gave diminishing returns, throwing my life out of balance as I pursued a few tenths of a second off my lap times.
- Wrenching: yes, working on motorcycles and other projects in the garage is very rewarding. It’s like 3D chess as far as all the problem solving and meticulous attention that it requires. But, you need a garage to sprawl things out and work on a project in phases. I’m no closer to having that kind of space than I was three years ago.
- Music: yeah, enough of that. Playing in bands generally led to disappointment. Beautiful moments of creating, but it requires a lot of effort and trust in people who have generally failed to deliver. A home studio and creating music on my own would be a passion project…if I had space to set up a home studio, and wanted to spend several thousand dollars on the equipment needed.
- Service: that’s probably the best option. Being of service to others, so that the benefits of my effort are felt by more than just myself, makes me feel great. This is one benefit I get from volunteering for the Veterans Charity Ride, from publishing my writing or performing live music, or from working as an officer for the sidecar racing club I rode with, or nearly any endeavor that’s shared. But recent experiences of giving my all to a person and having it fall into a bottomless pit of need and unappreciative-ness has left a sour taste that still hasn’t faded. I still like volunteering, but I am more detached and struggle to engage passionately, and will probably continue this way until I can move past this sour feeling.
- Travel: not actually a passion. Travel is really just an expression of learning, which is definitely a passion of mine. It’s one of the only things I consistently do. I’m reading three books right now and spend a few hours a day reading news, whether on the world, racing, motorcycling, or history and technology: it’s a deep well of engagement.
I do find meaning in learning, but it has proven too broad a thing to convert from meaning to purpose. Purpose plus learning would be getting another degree, or signing up for personal enrichment classes. That’s a possibility given the world of online learning. More than just watching how-to videos on YouTube, you can engage passionately with courses that have a structure.
Even if there’s just a pass/fail grade, there is a target to aim for, and a reason to fix your sights on something instead of just shooting at life from the hip.
I should also look for more ways to volunteer. Even if I’m struggling to do it passionately, doing it is like passion-practice. Do it, keep doing it, and watch yourself get better over time. Veterans Charity Ride is only a one month commitment. Maybe there are different ways to contribute, or different causes or projects to commit to. I have to remember to just keep doing, and not to try and wait for the perfect opportunity to just change everything in a single breath. Opportunity is often disguised as hard work.
Gold plated problems
Yes, having too much free time sounds like a stupid thing to complain about, but then again, if this seemed like complaining instead of a personal inquiry, I think you just wasted a lot of time reading this far. Perspective is a sonofabitch.
There are plenty of retired people who have too much free time, who can relate. The average person though is likely to remember nostalgically to their childhood, in the dog days of summer, climbing trees or staring at the sky because the usual childhood games had been played to death. That might be the last time you can remember having too much time, but there are farmers in developing nations who lack the tools to work the land, who bemoan their extra time: perspective is a sonofabitch.
And so, despite all this spare time, I have important matters to attend to; the taco truck closes in less than an hour. And perhaps this exercise fired up enough dormant brain cells to do more work on the book. The root problem remains though: how to find meaning in life when meaning comes from within? I’ve dredged up some possibilites, but they have to be applied out there in the world somewhere. Yet first I have to generate it somewhere inside myself in order to apply it outside in the world.
Kind of feels like a printer without ink. No really, think about it. Because the damned thing IS NOT OUT OF INK. The damn ink is in there but you have to fight with your internal software to bypass its absurd and arbitrary rules. Getting the ink to the page is natural for a printer — it’s really its only function — but it’s only easy and natural, until it’s not. I think we’ve all fought with a printer enough to understand that analogy. Screw you, Hewlett-Packard.
If this were a piece meant for publication I’d need to tie things back to the doldrums, with solution-oriented metaphors about getting wind in the sails, or reference compasses and rudders and trade-winds. It is not one of those pieces. Hell, it would be hard to even pitch a story like that, despite so many people being able to relate to the doldrums.
But people want to read about weathering storms and battening down hatches. Stories of a ship bobbing like a cork, the sails slack and useless, are more prescient to our modern lives, but it is not the escapism people in the modern world are searching for. “Don’t explain the problem, offer me a solution.” Of course, understanding the problem is the first step to finding the best solution. Perspective is a sonofabitch.
Ever thought about how we spend our lives engaged in a society that works so hard to keep up safe and full of abundance, but we sit at work daydreaming about things like fishing or hiking or sailing or being outdoors? You know, things we had to do daily before we created these complex societies. When we had to be outdoors and spent most of our time hunting, gathering, or preserving, we wanted ease.
Now we have ease and we want to spend our spare time hunting, gathering, and being connected to nature. As a species we really seem to cultivate a life experience that has us not getting what we want, which I admit does make the attaining of it all the more sweet…but it’s still a childish game to play. Of course, oftentimes in our lives the only difference between order and chaos is perspective, which makes perspective perhaps the most important thing we can ever seek.
“There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.”
-Ancient proverb
Johnny Killmore 