Personal Matters

Christmas has been going really well. It's crazy how quickly the new year is coming. This has probably been the best year of my entire life, despite it all. Despite having a total nervous breakdown in April. I've gotten back on my horse in a way I never have before in my entire life.

I've always had obligations before. Now, though, I make a living writing full-time. I've been doing so much writing and coding. There are so many things I don't have to worry about anymore. I'm really happy I invested so much time and energy into university and Write Club, but not having any of those kinds of obligations anymore has made it so easy to focus on what truly matters to me.

Creating calgarygroups.ca with Yvonne has been a wonderful success. CM Calgary posted about us and we gained a lot of traffic from that. I just did a major overhaul of the site due to a few small errors Yvonne made—it was easy enough to fix. I also added about 50 more organizations myself in the process.

And then there's my newest personal project that I'm totally in love with: brennan.day. It's been SO fun to work on my personal site like this. I love how it looks and how it operates. I'm writing a few deep-dive posts into specifics on certain technical implementations as well as design choices.

I'm really lucky. Life is so meaningful and rich. Funnily enough, I feel way more comfortable about my health anxiety since I created a /death page. I don't need to worry anymore about dying suddenly, I feel. I want to preserve my writing and projects, and release them freely to the public.

The Absurd Hypothetical Advent Calendar

For the past month on 750words.com, Buster has implemented a daily prompt. Most of these have been silly beign thought experiments, but a few days ago there a question that I'm going to be chewing on for a long time:

Would you rather live only 5 more years but be able to buy anything you want and be remembered forever, or live to 100 with an average but comfortable life that's mostly forgotten? Which do you choose and why?

I feel as though as I currently am, I could make a lot of meaningful and good progress in just five years. Again, I feel as though I run into the issue of what exactly I could buy, as I would want to focus on philanthropy and humanitarianism.

On the flip side of the coin, I love life. I would be perfectly okay being forgotten because no matter what my legacy is, no matter how impressive, it will be forgotten eventually. Only because entropy is inevitable. I think of how quickly the past five years have gone for me and it feels so fleeting. I am sure the next five years of my life would go by even faster. Living to a hundred years, though? That's more than two more lifetimes I could experience. I could spend so much time with my loved ones, experiencing beauty and art. I could write so much, but of course all that writing would be, in some way, in vein because of how I'll be forgotten.

Which is the more selfless answer? Which is the more honourable?

But with all that mulling, I need to remind myself this is a hypothetical. This is a rare instance where I can have my cake and eat it too. Nothing is stopping me from pursuing my goals and living deeply and at length. Isn't that wonderful.

I know a major part of this, though, is taking care of myself. I haven't been doing a good job at that at all with my body. I've been eating junk food, with so much gifted to me over the holidays and Christmas.

I know I need to push myself towards simple things. A daily walk. That's really all I need. An hour outside. Not allowing myself to make excuses or exceptions. I never make an excuse regarding writing. Even when I feel as though I have nothing to write, I'm still here putting in the work. And it's elevated to the point now where I feel as though if I just write a simple journal entry like this, then I'm slacking.

My baseline has just gotten higher and higher. I've dedicated myself, I have discipline—I just need to utilize it in this one last area. And how do I do that?

Movement. Grace.

I need to walk, I need to dance. I need to move. The grace given to my body. I think about dance a lot.

Specifically, Nietzsche's thoughts on dancing, how throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he uses dance as a touchstone for life-affirming values. "I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance," Zarathustra declares, and elsewhere: "Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing."

For Nietzsche, dance represented the way to teach readers how to affirm life here and now on Earth as human bodily selves. His Zarathustra is described as someone "bearing the heaviest of destinies" yet "the lightest and most opposite—Zarathustra is a dancer."

How can someone who says No to everything still embody lightness? Through movement. Through the body's participation in life.

Dance, for Nietzsche, was another way of saying Yes! to life. It appears in his work as an activity practiced by the strong to preserve their ability to digest their experiences. Those who dance are those unburdened by ressentiment, by the need for revenge. They move forward.

I believe this directly ties to the Sufi whirling dervish. The hypnotic, continuous spinning originating with the 13th-century Persian mystic poet Rumi. The Mevlevi Order he inspired practices the sema ceremony, where spinning in repetitive circles symbolizes a spiritual ascent toward divine love.

Rumi believed that music and dance were pathways to the divine. It's said that the Whirling Dervishes were born out of his ecstatic moments of spinning in joy while reciting poetry.

The dance is structured. The white skirt symbolizes the ego's shroud, while the tall hat represents the ego's tombstone. As they spin, one hand stretches toward the sky to receive divine blessings, the other points toward the earth to channel those blessings to humanity.

The four turns of the sema represent different stages: the going-forth of creation from the Unity. Man's ascension to God through mystic exercise; annihilation in God; and the eternal order restored. Each turn lasts between eight to eighteen minutes. An active meditation. A physical expression of letting go.

The spinning motion is symbolic of the cosmic dance of creation and destruction, representing the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. By surrendering to the whirling motion, practitioners seek to let go of their ego and connect with the divine essence that permeates all existence.

Rumi's Poetry

Rumi wrote in the Masnavi:

"The trees, donning their dancing gowns, supplicate in love."

For Rumi, the house of Love was made completely of music, and music was the sound of the doors of paradise. The sama ceremony, the name literally means "to listen to music," becomes a way of giving one's whole being away to sound and movement.

"The Sama means to die to this world and to be revived in the eternal dance of the free spirits around a sun that neither rises nor sets," scholar Annemarie Schimmel observed. Fana and baka, annihilation and eternal life in God, can be represented in the movement of this mystical dance.

Through the dance, the dervish understands the possibility of the eternity of the soul. The body is given to the earth, and the mind and soul can concentrate on the fully transcendental. The Mevlevi philosophy is called transcendental philosophy and yet the body is not denied. It's in this understanding that the power of the Whole, the Totality of life, is comprehended.

How Bright My Future Is

The body is not separate from the spirit, movement is not separate from thought. To move is to think with the flesh. To dance is to affirm existence itself.

I need to walk. I need to dance. I need to move.

The grace given to my body—how bright my future is.