Talking to Id

There are more important things in life than dancing…

Dianna’s word rendered me speechless for a moment. I had heard that before, it was Dianna who said it back then, but heard by a complete different person. It was Id the dancer who was present and it was Id that interpreted the meaning in his own twisted way. Yeah, the reintegration of my Id is not going as smoothly as my super ego. While different, my ego (real life) and super ego (online life) were still linked by logic, whereas Id and my true self have no common ground.

This made me remember something I asked Luda (now Mila) once about James. “What is James like when he’s with you in private? Who is James without the politician?” The answer I got from her felt really strange to the person I was at that moment and is a good representation of what I would like to achieve with my Id. My Id, the dancer, isn’t as scary as multiple personality disorders that you read about in horror stories, but rather a combination of learned feelings and sentiments that eventually end up driving my behavior whenever I am near any dance venue. Decades of ego (the day to day bravado ego, not the Freudian ego) driven action led by adrenaline rushes have created automatic emotional responses that overrode any logic and normal behavior. To put it more simply, I am constantly in a state of metaphysical “fight or flight” response on interpreted reaction from people’s body languages. Whether or not I am an accurate reader of people’s internal dialog or I am imagining all of these is still up for debate.

The Chautauqua I am holding with Robert M. Pirsig’s audio book is really helping in this situation. We’d spent hours on my daily runs, debating and deconstructing the fundamental constructs of reason and logic, him with an omnipresent statement and me ready to crack on his statements with the fundamental understanding that I shall take nothing he states as the whole truth. I am am grateful that I am learning from him, on the journeys of re-integrating the passionate part of myself and shattering the sense of intellectual superiority that seems to permeate people in the technology industry. I am grateful because I have reached the conclusion that to understand Id, I have to stop putting reason and logic above everything else and who else than someone who’s been there before than Robert M. Pirsig.

Which is probably the reason why last night, I am able to hear what Dianna is trying to get through to me this whole time. Her words backed by a decade of chasing a dream… my dream, prompted to the open by the tortured tone in my voice and her empathy of my dream. Maybe I am just imagining these meanings. Either way, it’s a step in the right direction. I don’t remember what we were talking about exactly but with every answer, there must be a question. It is only fitting to try and find the root question that fit the answer correctly. Mine was a legitimate pondering of how to quit something I was once passionate about?

For most people, they fall in and out of dancing or any physical activity without the need to think about formally quitting. The problem arises for me with any passion when I reach the precipice of deciding whether or not to devote my life to that one thing and if I were to stop that one thing, it will mean taking away part of my self identity. Continuing past that point without any progress towards the total devotion only serves to prolong the agony and trigger fond memories for me.

I wish that one day, I will be able to move freely in soul mountain because of my devotion to its belief and enjoyment of its rocks, not because I need to reach the next curb by the urging of my ego (non Freudian).