Excerpt from "2324 SATURDAY April 17th, 2021": Not from here. Come, kill me in a dream. Release the shackles binding me here--this place has outgrown me. Quick--before I disappear in this bed of roses--the forceps will do just fine. Make do with it--a thorn should remain at the side, let it keep my purpose and give transient goals until larger spikes come. Smog fills the periphery. You can see the mold on me, as an acid rain of 1000 days washes our impurities. The damp frame of life wilts, being crushed under the weight of its view. The weaver, a greedy peerer, she peers at what could be, away from the chains of a life fit without it. For she waves, no steps taken in a year's time, a mere inch of movement--a break from chains--losing her roots, too soon she would rot away. Having already jumped, the hard plastic bubble wrap falls out of the pocket: a cause, a curse, a cure, a sentence to mindlessness. Oh, she'd talked for days, but interacted with no one. In that moment, a reflection in front of her. A face unrecognized, but possessed nonetheless. 'Who is this? Why do they fear me, approaching slowly?' She thought, for a moment, the person--or thing--was familiar, a face seen. Closer. Close. So close. Inches--no, centimeters now. Featureless, gray, mute. ... Darkness. Not a blackness, nor a dim room, but rather what the blind see devoid of an otherwise present sense. She thought, 'A human experience?' Not quite, and not the first, and far from the last. A suspension of perception. What happens to the mind in lieu of all other input? The sole sense becomes all, the sense of self, realization of individuality, an entity disconnected now, for previously to take advantage of all else--a pitiful and ungrateful bunch really. No more pain. And yet the memories persist. Regret. You're not here, nor there, nor wherever. You are. Existence for the sake of itself is an unnecessary redundancy, so why do I? You're getting the hang of it now, but there is nothing to question, for there is no answer. So... I just 'be'? No questions. So... No, you'll slowly deteriorate, just as you did there, here, and where. Soon the mind will dissipate and feed back into the entropy you unknowingly usurped. DFWYNLM #145 Furthermore, "0016 THURSDAY April 29th, 2021": Time spent, nights wept, crossed values; the mind wanders, heart weakening, and atrophy setting in. No more pain, a dull ache. Let it settle, no more pain. Mind is less, sound is slowly leaving. Where was the childish delight in these things? Shortness of attention, attentive to none, feelings of self survive, relations draw distant. No more pain, no more fear. No less sane, but end comes near. And so I relapse in fear, I repulse at the thought of anything being in colour, take it away, the spirit of it all must go, let not the soul remain, for it craves too much for the body to handle. Blood boils, flesh rends, muscle tears; in the moment, it fights bricks and mortar, it cries of faint glory but does no climbing. The feral will scratch until fingers bleed, it screeches for what it cannot see, but is forced to watch; this wretch is jealousy, envy, loneliness, soulache, self-sabotage, denial, inferiority, impatience, unwillingness; this is the beast, a cancer of the soul, destroyer of wills and gatekeeper of progress. Asset denial is of its top priority. Fighting it can be done, surely, but with an evasive excalibur not seen nor yet discovered. A mere illusion until witnessed. Meanwhile, the beast ravages on. Havoc done cannot be undone. Time rendered inaccessible. Investments razed. Best to forge on and refocus elsewhere, but the beast lies stubborn and ablaze, ecstatic and unsatisfied in its castle of ruin. Truth is, it remains in hope of changing its ways. That in enough time, scars will be forgiven, settlements rebuilt, and habits changed without winds of motion and movement. A heavy miasma of blind naivety hangs round its head, drawn from neck to ceiling. Along a plank it walks, precariously perched between 'have' and 'have-not'. Be it wealth of the mind. or lessons taught for others. A small boy glances forward, and an elderly man glances back. At the end of it all, how complacent are we with our own death? Planted beneath our spine, which seeds are bamboo, and which is vine? What is the threshold for being alive and not merely living? What passes first, the body or the intrinsically linked mind? How did a shelter, self-built, become to be a prison? You see, these thoughts are self destructive, but they feed it, they appease the beast aflame, despite making trying times desolate matters. This pity pit has room for one, but others may donate a spade. And in this blind naivety, you thought escaping the environment could change the context, but this state of affairs has always been constructed by the self, and construed through the looking glass, made of the same grit blinding your eyes after a long night of weeping paroxysm. A single solace along the knife's edge, the glint of a barrel in moonlight, a swinging shadow of twine, still wings sprouting in freefall, a prescription finished in an instant, numbness, a flooding darkness, flashes of what blind people see, and a finale of DFWYNLM #147 Reflections Somber thoughts can creep up on us unexpectedly and pray on our psyche at the most vulnerable of times. When I wrote these entries, I was on the precipice of a transitory period of my life, reflecting on what had been a very eventful four years of an undergraduate degree. I had a plan going forward, excited at its prospect, but nonetheless enveloped in the feeling that I could have done so much more. In hindsight, much of the inadequacy I feel alongside young adults in general is that of comparison, in the flawed virtue of subjecting the same judgement paradigm to yourself as of others. But this is a great liability; it can be an informant to our aspirations but also a bottomless pit. It's sort of like what your guardian figures may have told you: pick your friends wisely, surround yourself with the right crowd, don't get caught up in the wrong groups. etc. etc. The difference is, of course, in the ease of falling to aspirational greed, altogether biting off more than one can chew at a given moment. In childhood, there really are countless possibilities moving forward. In truth, this paradigm never changes. Sure, barriers do morph with decisions we make, or uncontrollable life situations, but this remains an incontrovertible fact. Any given possibility can be met with countless counter-possibilities, and counter-counter-possibilities. And this begins to touch upon why comparison is a flawed practice, but one we cannot help enacting and participating in through daily life. That is not to say we should render all comparative processes dubious, but rather shape them to better examine the true aspects of one's life, through a lens of compassion and understanding. The importance of examining the differential complexities of one's life to the next should not be understated. We all come into this world of the same worth but on different footing, and through it we retain the same worth but nevertheless must find our own path. University and other environments similar to it cultivate this feeling: of always struggling, moving forward and grasping at any prospect of fulfilment. It's a rat race--for many, it churns out variable expectations and results. You're enrolled alongside your classmates in a unified progression toward graduation, and yet enthralled by the constant competition of it all. Education is, in my opinion, a constant sprint forward. It can be incredibly invaluable, but the spell cast on us to chase after the penultimate moment of fulfillment--that being graduation--is oft a gateway to another chase. This isn't a bad thing--it does however distract from and dilute the quality of existence in the moment, for the moment. I cherish the many memories I've made through my education, and weep for those I've lost, but feel grateful nonetheless for that they've happened. And through life, I have come to understand that these memories must be held close, especially in times of strife. Education is, by its nature, cyclical strife: each year we begin anew with the first day of classes, and end with a slurry of exams. It's hard, a true testament to mental fortitude, but also to that of one's own unique set of skills and situation. Our performance is not guided by our internal motivation and intellect alone, but a cumulation of our personalities, liabilities, surroundings, dependents, and every other aspect of our lives. Education does not exist in a vacuum, nor should the evaluations of which we take part. I was fortunate to see the many ways in which excellent educators took students' unique situations into account, and saw how students could engage with helpful resources suited to their respective situation (for example, evaluation deferrals, regrading requests, etc.), but this rule does not always hold true. I too saw the apathy some instructors showed toward their students. This "toughen up" mentality is common in many fields of academia, and professions for that matter--it reflects a long lived culture of "hazing". Wherein, the previous generation had it bad, so they think the following generation too should experience the same magnitude of struggle, if not worse. One may argue this reflects the past 200,000 or so years of evolution, such that the fit gets fitter and the second fiddle gets, well, fiddled, but I'd like to think we're sensible enough to know that apathy is not the solution. Under most circumstances, it selects for likeminded individuals who enable this behavior and end up furthering it in time. It also tramples over just as worthy, just as valuable human lives. Likewise, however, complete enabling of inaction and inability can be dangerous. Most could formulate an excuse for inaction, and in most cases, it is certainly legitimate. But allowing any such excuse under any circumstance is not clearly helpful for either party. At worst it allows for lackluster performance and eventually senescence, and at best it can provide much needed support and healing. Clearly, the solution lies across this axis: the former being practical apathy, the latter embodying total empathy. Educational practice, and perhaps life's relations in general, lie along this axis. Balancing practical apathy and total empathy (PA/TE for simplicity) is a delicate practice. It requires an astute observer who may very well know or guess accurately at the ability of one to perform under pressure. Feel too indifferent, and one may crack. Be too understanding, and one may underdeliver. Education and teaching requires such a balance of encouragement and understanding. It should never be a case of one over the other. Both must always be present. Certainly though, putting this to practice across few students (say, a small tutoring group of 2-5 people) seems reasonable. And certainly it is. The challenge arises when applying this principle to widespread use. Take for instance, university classrooms sometimes reaching above 1000 students. How is an instructor to individually reason with and understand each student's situation? The onus does fall on the student to raise some concern, or make one aware of her situation, but likewise, great responsibility is put on the professor to enable her students to broach such concerns in a safe and accessible manner, and to be heard out fairly without bias. Both parties must engage, state their cases, and adjudicate as seen fit. Even still, there is some err in the amount of power awarded to instructors to delegate the outcome of these situations. This is where the PA/TE axis comes into play, and where instructors ought to align themselves accordingly. It is an arbitrary axis and surely not one which affords the absolute right answer in all situations, but does describe a means for envisioning or weighing how one might consider engaging a challenging situation. It has been my experience this axis is learned, refined, and fine-tuned with experience and engagement with students of diverse and varied backgrounds in all sorts of complex situations. This is where the core tenets of empathy, objectivity, and morality are involved and executed by the responsibility of the individual. Furthermore, the ability and humility to admit mistake is paramount to our learning and personal tuning of this axis. The struggle of education is not to be mistakeless, but to learn from them and of them, and perhaps in learning, to make more complicated and challenging mistakes--such that the lessons of yesterday's mistakes are the principles of tomorrow's success. But this is all somewhat beside the point. It is perhaps shortsighted to say that most things are determined by chance, but genuinely, the randomness of which we have access to opportunity, are given resources, even borne into certain localities with all their benefits and drawbacks, really is decided by nothing at all. In this way we truly don't ever determine our set starting conditions, but can forever affect where we ought to go. It is this precise fact that it seems many admissions processes seem to fall short of realizing. I was fortunate to be surrounded by genuinely helpful and well-meaning individuals--this seems to be the norm for some, albeit not all schools--so I never quite felt this sense of competition. It is only ever made apparent as one applies for jobs and postgraduate education. Even some volunteer positions within school are subject to quite extraneous review process, where any candidate is an excellent one, and the question then arises of who is truly most deserving. One arbitrary or circumstantial characteristic then takes hold over the next, and that line of bias and interpretation is the basis of decisions dictating the next years, sometimes decades of someone's life. It's a stressful decision to make, especially when that decision may be regretted in time. Personally, grappling with regret has been a tough emotion to surpass. With endless possibilities ahead of me and only one track of choices made behind me, of course nothing will ever be 100% satisfactory, if there are hundreds of other ways to go about achieving a goal. But it only speaks to the incompleteness of life, and perhaps the alternatives opened through rejection, and reinvigoration of one's wills. Loss, failure, and rejection can all be the motivative spark for things otherwise not possible under "perfect" conditions. This type of distress turned eustress is exactly what we can achieve given the right guidance and self-ascribed patience and understanding. The longing for death is a controversial and perhaps romanticized notion. More than ever, today we are reminded on all corners of the internet that everyone around us is winning in some way. If you, for example, knew 365 people, who each reached a life's milestone once a year and posted publicly about it, then on average you'd see one person post per day about some rightly celebrated achievement. But the inadvertent result is one where we feel everyone is winning all the time, and we only 1/365 as often. This, alongside the "hustle culture" and many other productivity movements emphasize these feelings of never doing enough, being enough, or achieving enough. It's certainly a suffocating load to be forced under, and isn't so easily addressed by even taking action in one's own life. Because nobody accomplishes yearly what 365 other equally motivated individuals do altogether. And so it follows that such an absurd task bears too heavy on one's mind, so why bother chasing after hopeless fantasies of success? True, many do find success and don't become caught up in the disillusionment of impossible feats of will, rather investing in sensible tasks or projects. It is a true tragedy, however, to see bright, precocious individuals overburden themselves with their own externally sourced expectations without allowing the patience and understanding of scope to focus on what is realistic. Guidance and assistance goes a long way, and that's where educators and other mentor figures really impact future generations. It goes past the classroom. It isn't a lesson, it is a structured haven of predictability in a world otherwise devoid of it. Four walls and a set of rules--stick to them, and you'll excel. Don't worry about the chaotic nature of the outdoors. Truthfully, this is a good starting point but falls short of preparing one for the real world, which is nothing but chaotic, and often not wholly governed by rules. It is a thing we stumble through and hope to make sense of years after the fact, if at all. So why strike it out and throw everything away? The answer clearly varies from person to person, but a unifying factor may be feeling overburdened and never achieving a fraction of the potential that we and others set out for ourself. The struggle of moving through academia does somewhat remind me of the Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. In brief, Sisyphus is being punished by the gods for what is essentially dissent and espousal of political scandals (spicy indeed). His punishment entails pushing a boulder up a mountain, but as he reaches the top, the boulder rolls back down, and he is forced to restart. In the novel, Camus essentially posits that Sisyphus, faced with an ever repeating menial task, must despite all else be happy. In that the process of struggling toward a goal, seeking it out and maintaining hope in the process does in some way provide fulfilment and with it, happiness. It is reminiscent of the campy "oh, maybe the real x was the x we made along the way" in that the journey is more enlightening than the final goal itself. This is a commonly repeated motif in film and literature. But especially for the average careers-person, specifically focusing on the academic, there seems to be an addiction to struggle and the challenge of overcoming it. The true challenge arises when the struggle becomes too much, or manifests in unpredicted ways, and yet addiction remains. How might Sisyphus react if, with every step he took, he slid two more back? Camus might argue that he would rejoice at the opportunity for a new challenge. But such is more difficult and perhaps less common in practice. It is indeed the right mindset to be in (that is, never faltering with failure, struggle, disapproval or otherwise), but given so many respond oppositely, how can we curb this guttural response to absolutely throw everything away at the sight of an even slipperier slope? Camus argues in favour of acknowledging and cognitively embracing the absurdity of it all. The "Just World Hypothesis" is indeed a fallacy. Bad things happen to good people, and vice versa, often without reason--trying to find some deeper meaning to it all is in some cases, counter-intuitive and at best, pointless. That isn't to say we should avoid reflection on past actions completely--rather that we can control some things, but the vast majority of it all is random and not up to our discernment. Earlier last year, I got pooped on by a bird during a picnic. It seems illogical to extrapolate that the bird excreted on me as a punishment, or that it was a means of proving my status as a "bad person" that deserves it. All I was left to do is ponder at the random, comical absurdity of it, and laugh. Sure, it provided a mild inconvenience, but it was hilarious. This is exactly the type of acknowledgement Camus argues we need to develop with absurdity. It may provide inconvenience, but we must largely remain appreciative of it all. Scornful appreciation. So the very root of the issue one faces at "a single solace along the knife's edge, the glint of a barrel in moonlight, a swinging shadow of twine, still wings sprouting in freefall, a prescription finished in an instant, numbness, a flooding darkness..." is the negatives of an addiction, and the following catastrophic reaction to the underlying absurdity and unpredictability of it all. We are educated in and surrounded by environments embodying predictability, and yet end up facing a life subject to randomness. This sobering realization is what graduates often wrangle and must quickly take hold of moving into the workforce. Learning theory is good, but it only provides a framework we must manipulate and adjust to fit its actualization. As educators, I think it is crucial to convey the unpredictability of the world while maintaining some responsibility for one's actions, to a reasonable extent--placed somewhere along the PA/TE axis. It is crucial we advocate for a positive relationship between struggle and self-worth, in that students know they have supports available, and their failures have no bearing over their innate worth as people and life-long learners. I think, then, there ought to be some sort of cultural revolution redefining the relationship between professional success and one's self worth. That in one's failures still deserves one's own respect, empathy, and kindness. Furthermore, that we may look more fondly on our past mistakes knowing they could improve our future actions. We are, by definition, an iterative species at the level of generations and daily life. We are constantly trying to figure ourselves out--it's no wonder we might falter from time to time, or get confused, or discouraged. We are human, and that is good, and that is okay. We are part of the absurdity that one must embrace. The point of all of this is: the "suck" makes us stronger. We ought to embrace our failures, and turn to others for support and guidance when needed. We ought to chose to live, and we ought to teach to the best of our abilities, that struggle is rewarding regardless of the outcome, and that our past mistakes are not tied to our self worth. We ought to want to become better, and that's why we ought to chose life. Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566 If you or anyone you know if struggling with suicide, please seek help. You are forever worthy of life and living.

Except from "0015 WEDNESDAY October 13th, 2021" And here I come to realize, my life of comfortable status-quo is one of my own creation--a bland mantlepiece I must own up to. For I have known this for long, but equally so denied it. The concept of stagnancy Everything in life involves some degree of risk and sacrifice. Complacency and acceptance of a current situation as the immutable final destination is, ironically, a risky endeavor. One that instills a sense of comfort smothering all forms of dread possible from the sudden realization of overflowing, stagnant and deathly waters. The water is warm, why ever adjust the faucet? The issue is one of murky water, cloudy with solutes and providing no real nutritional advantage. The choice is actually quite clear and not clearly refuted, but understandably practiced and on a level we are all familiar with yet mostly chose to ignore. In a biological sense, humans are hardwired toward comfort, safety, and energy-conservation. This isn't an innately shameful thing and should not be overextended to be understood as being immobile, inactive, or even more generally as aging. If understood in terms of time, we are in no way stagnant--we are forever aging. This could be better understood as an accumulation of memories and experiences contributing to the development of self, inner morality, and subjective beliefs. Understood in the latter way, stagnation describes a lack of development or refinement, whether in favourable or unfavourable directions. It would be impossible, say, for a moral or immoral being exerting some force on the world to be stagnant. The 'rotting' of sorts takes hold when any actor denies herself the right to development in any moral or physical direction. In this way, learning (including but not limited to life experiences and education) and by extension, interactivity, is the antithesis of stagnation, and in it we should place great importance for the purpose of furthering our sense of mental and physical being. In this way, any action taken that we consciously engage in and subsequently allow to mold our perceptions about the world, smothers stagnation. For example, when we engage in a political debate with a colleague, we purvey the possibility for collective learning and refinement of ideas for both parties (after all, it is probably a truism to say that holding a certain belief requires proper and fair understanding of the opposition--confidence in one's opinion is derived from mutual understanding and the patience and respect for careful dialogue surrounding it). We do a service against stagnation of the other by way of introducing ideas or points novel to the individual we engage. The action is well initiated if taken with good intention. However, in listening to our colleague, we largely disservice ourselves by opening our ears but shutting our auditory nerves. Stagnation is a refusal to change, engage in alternative thinking, or generally reject without consideration any points made. In learning, we may indeed strengthen our confidence in our own subjective beliefs, but regardless provide our colleague with the respect, patience, and consideration to be heard out even on points with which we may vehemently disagree. This is obviously the nature of good mannered discourse--and in it, I find stagnation to be avoided. Perhaps this is all common sense, but look to most of today's popular political debates and you may find it all but common. Why does the concept of stagnation matter? For the most critical, the question persists of why avoiding stagnation matters, and what impetus compels us to avoid it. I think stagnation has a strong connection to morality that justifies interactivity. Let us consider the following line of thought: Morality can broadly be considered as doing something good, usually with implications connecting other individuals or their interests. Moral actions can be understood as bringing good intentions into existence through their execution. Acting morally serves to do good to the world around us. Meaningfully moral actions necessarily interact in some way with living things around us, specifically, other humans. Moral actions contribute to a greater body of human experience--the greater good. We, as humans, have a moral obligation (Peter Singer gives perhaps the strictest of definitions) to do good for others. Learning contributes to the refinement of a moral axis--without it, we struggle to establish a mental picture of morality from birth to death--although some studies do suggest we are born with a tendency toward moral goodness. Stagnancy refers to the conscious choice to reject learning, development, or refinement of one's character and actions, which inevitably affects how we interact with the world and the people in it. As humans existing in a space closely interlaced with other humans, based around human interaction, we ought to be moral and avoid stagnation. In this way, stagnation applied to morality undermines it. It is important to consider the idea of stagnancy in our own lives insofar as it is reasonable to expect interactivity. Perhaps, in this way, absolute stagnancy can be more specifically defined as the complete resistance, or rejecting engagement and consideration of the forces around us--trying to exist in an orbital with no charge or inertia, where all other actors exhibit some form of these two qualities, in constant flux of differential velocities and accelerations. Let us consider the case of those who cannot, for a sickness of body and/or mind, interact with the world around them. Specifically, I will consider the medically brain dead as being severely impaired with interacting with the world around them. A brain dead individual has a minimal if not zero chance of ever presenting again as their previous self. These individuals, in being tended for by family and healthcare professionals, are acting as a moral agent, even in complete inaction and lack of a forthcoming mind. They are contributing to the development of opinions, professional practice, and refinement of knowledge. I don't want to discount the complexity of feelings family or caregivers tending for an unresponsive patient have--rather, to emphasize that even the evoking of an emotional or cognitive response in those surrounding us contributes to a moral axis, beliefs, and subjective human experience--magnetizing them--exerting some force regardless of intentionality. We should never avoid feeling--rather, we should strive to be at peace and understanding with them. To return to the idea of an atom: these patients still have some degree of charge even if not consciously guided. In this way we can come to understand that we can all be agents of learning, or anti-stagnation. It is specifically in our interactivity that we take the form of a moral agent. Here the notion starts to become more clear: undermining all human relations is interactivity--cause and effect. Those with positive effects (which may vary greatly on situation and personal preference) comprise moral actions. Stagnation rejects interactivity, and by doing so, presents itself as a immoral choice. It is important to distinguish that this differs from amorality--that being a lack of conscious, moral choice--for example, an actor who to the best of our knowledge does not have some conscious system of morals to base their decisions on. Such may be the case of a predator to its prey; there is no moral wrongness nor righteousness in one animal killing another for survival. It is clear that our integration into a society of well-meaning individuals is crucial to this idea. I have maintained and wish to keep the notion that stagnancy is the dissolution of self. It, like the majority of reality, exists on an continuum--it is at all times hard to be anything absolutely, moral, immoral, active or stagnant--but some actions are certainly more moral than others, and likewise act more than they stagnate. I am no master of renewal and development, but it is an amicable goal to work towards. And perhaps maintaining that sense of hope is sufficient to stave off those murky waters--such is the chase for refinement of one's body and mind.