Dang, I really love this graphic.

Everywhere you go, you are bound only to meet yourself.
Your world folds in on itself, having no reach and no actual distance.
Every tree looks familiar and each rock is the same rock.
You are stuck walking the edge of a glass globe, in circles.

In your perpetual celebration of yourself and your tiny tiny world, your milestones are easily met. You – another you – stops to admire you and worship at your altar.
From the outside of this glassy globe we all see you worshiping yourself and lose interest, if we ever had any.

“Great job! You’re doing it. You’re perfect and there is nothing in the universe other than you,” you say to yourself. You tell a joke and you laugh.

Some of us watch you for the spectacle. Others hold out hope for your eventual growth. Most are too busy actually connecting with other people to notice you on the little shelf in the corner of the large room.

That’s not you.
Your large ambitions have always been your driving force. They brought you here. They are what make you great, and have always made you great, in every move you made. Do you think you’re done with all that now? Did you think you could just put that aside at the time of your choice? That’s not how ambitions work and that’s not how life works.

Having ambitions is not like female’s eggs or ear hair cells. You aren’t born with a finite number to use up and then you die.

It’s more like having really well-developed muscles. You’ve spent your life developing all this strength. To take advantage of what you’ve got, and to keep it in shape, you have to challenge your body with games, sports, and activities.

One’s spirit for ambitions need not be static or single-minded. Indeed, all too often, they are multifaceted and extremely dynamic. Just because you accomplished your old goals does not mean you are done accomplishing. That part of it, you already understand. The part you have trouble with is that to continue accomplishing, you have to set a goal for yourself. You must admit to yourself that there remain things in this world that interest you, and which would light your spirit on fire.

Choose something. Express an ambition. The size and scale of the goal is irrelevant.

“I want to learn how to knit my baby a sweater.”
“I want to learn how to play that song.”
“I want to learn to deal with problems better.”
“I will score 2,000 points at Photo Hunt.”
“I want to start my own scrapbooking business.”
“I want to retire at age 55.”
“I want to quit smoking.”

Are you really satisfied with everything you have?

Admit it. You have big goals underneath it all.

… Or is it that you feel powerless to change your life?

“I want to take control of my own life.”

“Design” on the other hand, is the manufacture of functional objects with a focus on aesthetic value. This will dispense your salt and massage your feet but it is shaped like a dolphin. It has a purpose.

Keep these two definitions clear. Design is about beautiful functionality, so it can be a part of every product we buy and use. Works of art help us to feel our feelings, to indulge in something pointless and useless, literally.

Here is where the snobby blogger (TM) normally pulls the left turn and argues that art is actually more valuable than design because it taps into a more primitive, more authentic, part of the human mind. They would tell you that even apes use tools, but only humankind makes art.

I won’t do that to you. I’m better than those fools.

How many times a day do you stare at something you like to stare at? Okay, how many times a week? I try to surround myself with colors I like to stare at, sounds I like to blare into my ears, textures I like to touch, and smells I like to inhale, because they make me feel good. Or feel something. If I can let myself do something that serves such little formal, mainstream “utility,” then I know I am truly living. Even if I have to make myself slow down and smell a rose, I am always glad I did.

This is art.

I’m intrigued by mysteries, those events of the past that defy clear understanding. Something could have either happened this way, that way, or some other way. We don’t know which. All we know is that it happened. No matter how unlikely the result, or how extraordinary the process, it happened.

I think a reason these mysteries are so interesting to me is that they force us to study the past. If we could recreate the event, we would. Then, we could study the causes and processes afresh. Paradoxically, however, without understanding the causes and processes, we cannot recreate it.

What is the point of such study? Isn’t it easier to conclude that it never happened at all, because it was statistically improbable? It’s definitely neater and cleaner that way. It was probably just a fluke anyway – an accident, a mistake, some crazy quirk of chance.

But mysterious, miraculous things happen all the time! Every day! All around us!

Prove it.

“In a 1996 study, Cathy Widom presented compelling data that indicated victims of child abuse were less likely than victims of physical abuse or neglect and no more likely than controls (individuals with no history of any form of abuse victimization) to commit sex crimes. In other words, whereas physical abuse and neglect appeared to increase the risk of later sex crimes, being a victim of [abuse] left individuals no more likely to commit such an offense than an individual who had never been a victim of [abuse].”

Get over the shock that the article is on sexual abuse and focus on the pattern they point out. Although we tend to think that victims of abuse are more likely to then grow up to abuse others in the same way, this turns out to be untrue.

I have long wondered how much one’s own experiences with people affect that person’s treatment of people. That is, if a person is showered in love, will he always be a joyful, loving person? Or, perhaps more to the point, if a person is treated with cruelty and malice, is it a forgone conclusion that he will be mean and cruel himself?

I have, myself, noted the effect of a good attitude. It’s infectious. Walk around your world, stand up straight, look everyone in the eye, and smile. Say hello to a stranger. I’m confident that you will be greeted with smiles in return, and you can watch your own contentedness spread out from you like a ripple in a lake. Everyone will start to smile at each other.

Indeed, the effect of negativity is equally clear. You can spot this on a crowded road at rush-hour. Serene drivers hang back and let everyone merge in as they come. “We’re all in this together,” they seem to think. But, it only takes one over-eager, disrespectful person to start a cascade of negativity. They mess up the harmony of the road, and the chaos spreads out from them. Soon, the frustration is obvious in the jerkiness of the traffic jam, in all the start-stop, start-stop.

Have you ever noticed yourself hurting someone the same way you were once hurt? You were once on the receiving end of the pain, and now you give it out to someone else.

Think about it: Someone treated you like dirt, and now you’re yelling at the waiter. Or you got into a fight with your boyfriend and now you’re ignoring your dog. Someone rejected you so now you reject someone else. They made your coffee wrong and now you’re picking a fight with your mom.

Why? Does it help us make sense of the pain to switch roles and see it from the other side? Or are we just out for revenge? It isn’t usually direct, personal revenge against the one who hurt us, but some kind of karmic revenge – revenge by proxy. It is the Pay-It-Forward model of pain. And that too, on a subconscious level; we may not even be aware we’re doing it.

Then, once again, why do it? Does it soothe us? Painful experiences thus seem like poison – we get rid of them by spitting them out on someone else and infecting them.

The study above, however, suggests victims of cruel treatment are not trapped in that cycle. They say that those people are no more or less likely to abuse someone than any other person in society. Their past does not foreclose their future. Well, that is a little hopeful.

Maybe this knowledge, this little hope, will be the pebble that starts a wave of happiness in and around you.