Limits

Everything we know and everything we believe is limited to a given extent. This is at once a bad and good thing. It is a bad thing because we may rely on assumptions when said assumptions are not appropriate for a given situation. I may make the mistake of believing that something or someone is the case when in fact my beliefs are too limited to make an informed and proper decision about such—which could result in a range of detrimental consequences. And it is a good thing because our limits are what permit growth and development; they are what engenders learning, and importantly, re-learning. As a scientist, this excites me because it means that what I may know and discover today could very likely be supplanted tomorrow; something new is always waiting to be known—my current knowledge is only as firm and as confident as the knowledge I will acquire tomorrow. And tomorrow will always await.

Certainty

Find yourself in the throes of despair and it will become painfully clear that an intractable symptom is the difficulty in trusting certainties, at least positive ones. But time and time again I rely on one particular certainty: that tomorrow always holds another day. The new day brings a new sun and with it the chance to try again, to win, to fight the darkness. This is the certainty that you can hold on to, the one that you can trust. And I wholly believe in this; I place my faith in every new day and in every new sun. Today the world may not be mine, but tomorrow...tomorrow the world waits to be won.

The Individualist and the Wilderness

As an individualist I have a very strong affinity with the wilderness. I would wager that many other individualists have a similar relationship. Nature is where the individualist can assert his or herself without restriction; the individualist and the wilderness have an almost inextricable bond. And it is a strange thing: that my need for deep and encompassing connections with other individuals is somehow negated when in the wild, that removing myself from human contact leads to a (temporary) dissipation for attachment. Perhaps for the individualist the need for this connection is unnecessary when placed in the most primal of environments. Or perhaps it is really its grandest fulfilment, that what I connect with in the wilderness has definitions that go beyond the prescriptions of human attachment.