“The obscure exists that it may cease to exist. Resistance is the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.”
Frédéric Amiel
A Tibetan lama once observed that the human soul first became aware of itself in Tibet. He believed that this is because the wind in Tibet never stops pushing against its inhabitants and that a soul is defined in pushing back against that wind. For the sake of this discussion, we are defined, to a certain extent, in our ability to push back against the world.
Nietzsche was of the opinion that our freedom is measured by the amount of resistance which one has to overcome, by the efforts it cost to stay aloft. He said that the highest type of free man can be found where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome. These three thinkers saw resistance as the fulcrum of all activities; the process of making the soul aware of its existence; and the attribute of the freest man.
I am of the opinion that one’s existence does not only lie in pushing back. Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted that a man can be imprisoned in a room with an unlocked door opening inwards. Such a man will stay imprisoned as long as it doesn’t occur to him to pull rather than push. Sometimes we think that existence means only to push back, forgetting that pulling things towards us may also bring about the same results of that postulated by our three thinkers mentioned above.
Resistance may either free or imprison your soul, it lies in yourself to choose whichever to be the case.
Can my identity only be found in pushing BACK?
Or may it lie in giving the pushing some slack?
Whatever the case between pushing and pulling may be,
they are tools which may imprison you, or ultimately set you free.
Comments
Post a Comment