Friday
It's a Friday night in thanks to Typhoon Bavi and I spent it with a few tall boys and watching Kenny Omega defeat MJF on AEW Dynamite to become world champion for the second time.
The last time Kenny Omega was champion was way back in 2021, which was a very memorable time in my life—beyond me bouncing back from losing a lot the year prior, I bought my first car, I started university in my 30s to finish my degree, AND it was a very special time in my AEW wrestling fandom with so many amazing matches and storylines that year. Watching it was also my mid-week decompression in a crazy time of working full-time while being back in college. Kenny being champ again? This win hit a lot of feels and I'm excited his match against Will Ospreay at AEW's big All In mega show in August.
It's been a long week, I'm tired AF and kind of happy I am not going out tonight. And I'm grateful that watching wrestling makes me so happy. I always feel a reset and like myself again when I catch up on this week's Dynamite. Tomorrow I'm planning to hit up my second Taiwanese wrestling show with one of my buddies, and as of now it's still on unless that the typhoon gets nuts.
I haven't journaled in a while, probably not wanting to write about █████ ███████ ██ and instead putting all those ████████ into gym motivation. But I've gotten back up.
What else is happening? I'm taking up freelance work for the first time in years from an old colleague. Not because I'm in a need for extra money (but I love extra money), but because it's in editing ads, which is what's wanted for video editors a lot these days. Since my current job isn't centered around cutting ads, I want to keep connections up to date, as well as having recent ad work in my portfolio. Ironically, my current job wants to start doing ads as of this coming week, so that's funny timing.
After weeks of not reading my current book queue, I jumped into it with a vengeance these past two weeks, specifically with Mistborn and What Matters Most. Here's some highlights from the latter than moved me and stayed with me this week:
People who most feared life when they were young . . . suffer later just as much from the fear of death. When they are young one says they have infantile resistances against the normal demands of life; one should really say the same thing when they are old, for they are likewise afraid of one of life’s normal demands. We are so convinced that death is simply the end of a process that it does not ordinarily occur to us to conceive of death as a goal and a fulfillment, as we do without hesitation the aims and purposes of your life in its ascendance.
One thing I have observed directly and many, many times as an analyst is that those who feel that they have taken risks, who, generally speaking, have lived their lives, have a much better time with their dying.
But it is clear that those who fail to risk being who they are, who shun diving into the journey, are the most fear-ridden, regretful, and recriminating. With such a compromised purchase on their own history, they blame others, castigate themselves, or live with debilitating regrets. This is a bad way to go.
When asked about death, Socrates opines that either it is the Big Sleep, in which case he can use the rest, or there is an afterlife and he looks forward to conversing with the philosophers who have gone before him. Moreover, he is drawn to the journey toward death because the reflective soul is always summoned to mystery, and to the enlargement that comes from respecting it, considering it, submitting to it.
I have sought to respect that mystery always. Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises, for as Voltaire observed, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is certainly absurd.” Spare us from those who are “certain,” for their certainties will become tomorrow’s institutionalized tyrannies—for them, and for the rest of us. Recall also Gotthold Lessing’s aphorism in the eighteenth century that if God were to hold in his right hand the truth and in his left hand the search for truth, one should choose the left, “truth” being accessible only to divinity, but the journey toward it, ever toward it, our noblest, most faithful calling.
I'll definitely do a full book highlights post when I finish What Matters Most, but these highlights were a nice contribution to my state of being this week so they get to be here too. Since it's 1am now, this technically can be a Saturday journal, but c'mon! Life-wise, it's still Friday until after I sleep.