Limitless

Originally written in mid-May, but I got busy and didn’t get around to looking it over again until the end of June. Enjoy!

Prelude

It’s been a while since I’ve last written. I have not had slack in my life recently, in part because I have been busy with school and organizing for different clubs and trying to figure out what I’m doing this summer, but also in large part because I’ve been having an absurd amount of fulfilling fun. In my last post, I intended to write about how great life had become as I molted my languidity, but it rapidly devolved into a boastful 95 Theses of “wow life is joy!” Indeed, life was brimming with exuberant exhilaration at that time, but the laundry list was a mere summative recitation, rather than a deep introspection, on my recent experience of life. I do want to document my recent adventures, for they too are truly terrible in volume and greatness, but I will take care to restrict its span, lest it become again the hollow substance of a blog post who yearns for greater depth.

Disclaimer: I write this piece with great ambition. My heart has been excited by a movie (soon to be discussed), and the soul within me that wishes to write has been banging against its cell bars for so long. I write this largely as continuous stream-of-consciousness thought, with a short outline I banged out in a minute to keep the boat on course. With how busy life is, and especially how it has been recently, I only write when the forces within pummel me harder than the barrage without, and so when I feel that I am bursting at the seams from within, I become compelled, as I do now, to thrust my world aside and burrow myself into this space, and so now I lay my soul bare. You see only the most violently expressive glimpses of my world.

tl;dr I’m really angsty right now, this is not representative of how I usually am or how I usually write

Warning: Unnecessary Spoilers Below

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I just finished watching it with my family, maybe ~30 minutes ago. Not an exceptional movie, but an enjoyable one, and one that I was primed (by my roommate, who had recommended the movie as a family friendly feel-good) to seek a message within. I’ll probably call him sometime tomorrow to see what his interpretation was (turns out my take is extremely shallow and the exact opposite of the point of the move. unfortunate). Walter Mitty is this single middle-aged white man that takes care of negative assets for the LIFE magazine. Really awkward guy, zones out a lot, has a crush on the recent female hire, hasn’t done anything interesting. By a MacGuffin-MacGyvered series of events, he finds himself jumping out a helicopter into the North Atlantic Ocean, fending off a shark attack, then biking+running+longboarding toward a volcanic eruption in Iceland, then finds himself hiking the Himalayas, all to find a man who will tell him about the whereabouts of the negative of a photograph.

I was talking about the movie with my sister afterwards, and she asked what I thought the message was. I bluffed an answer on the spot, and it’s probably not right, but it feels resonant, so I’m claiming it. I said something like:

This is certainly not true in all cases, and there are definitely worlds where this approach is actually actively bad. That said, it feels rather resonant with my current life, and so I happily claim this interpretation as my own.

Lately

There was one scene in particular that stuck with me after the movie ended. It is not this epic shot, nor is it this subtly beautiful moment. It’s exactly the kind of scene you would find on my Instagram reels for you page, the “you should go on a hike with your friends, you’ll never forget it” kind of scene. It was this expanding shot of him and two natives hiking in the vast landscape of the Himalayas. It looked like so many other hiking reels I had seen before, but because I was now in the world of the movie and physically back in my house back home, I saw my life and all those reels from a more distant and detached perspective.

In recent weeks, I have embarked on many adventures. I drove a car other than my own 20-year-old Lexus for the first time about a month ago, and was absolutely bedazzled by the sensitivity of the gas pedal and steering wheel (my passenger, on the other hand, did not find my “ok so i’ve only ever driven my car and i’ve probably only driven it like 20 miles in the past 2 years because of school” and “wait how do i turn this car on” and “how do you turn this car into reverse” and “WOAH THE CAR GOES SO FAST” and “woops that was the curb, wasn’t it” and “turn off nav, i know how to get there” very amusing at all; the car’s grab handle had never seen so white nor so tightly clenched a fist until that day. Trust me, I’m actually a good driver, as begrudgingly admitted by my passenger at the end of the car ride; I just took a bit to understand how driving a modern car works).

Anyways, a few weeks later, I drove a friend’s car filled with some of my favorite people on campus for SMT retreat, and the Himalayas scene from the movie reminded me of when I was driving this car of SMT people down PCH to get to the hostel. The vibes in that car were immaculate, and interestingly, I’ve spent much of my time in recent weeks in settings where the vibes have felt like this. In fact, such pleasant vibes have been an almost continuous fixture of my life the entirety of spring quarter, which is honestly so farcical to consider. But at the same time, other sentiments somehow lurk beneath this satisfaction, and there is a peculiar absence of feelings I deeply care about, like fulfillment, depth, and resonance. This is what I wish to write about.

Regret, But Not Exactly

I do not consider myself a regretful person. Common advice says that one should not regret, that what one did at a given time was the best that one could have done given what they knew and believed at the time, and that one could not truly know that a different action would have led to the alternate world they want. This is fair, and I largely agree with these takes.

I don’t feel regret in the sense that I wish that I had acted differently. But I do mourn that I was not in a position to have known or acted differently, a sense of sadness that feels almost exactly like the sympathetic pity I would feel if I had seen someone else make the decisions I had made in the situations I had been in. I wish that I had gone into college with the background and grit to take the 60CM series at Stanford my freshman year. I wish that I had enrolled in SLE and pushed myself to read and appreciate the beauty of the liberal education. I wish that I had lived on east campus my sophomore year so that I could spontaneously run into more people. I wish I had joined more clubs and interacted with more people and made more upperclassman friends. I wish I had pushed myself harder academically and physically and intellectually and socially and professionally and spiritually. I wish I had just known these things, and acted on them.

I say these things because I look at my life and there are things I wish I had. If I were to say these things to friends at Stanford, they would almost certainly say “You’re a junior! You still have another year! You can still do all these things! And life still goes on after Stanford!” They would be right.

Junior formal was a couple weeks ago: I had bought a ticket and was considering whether I wanted to go or not. Over the years, I’ve built up this internal heuristic of “just do things. increase your surface area with life. if it’s ever a question of to do, or not to do, it’s almost always to do. your life has almost always been better for it.” Except this time, I ignored the heuristic. In part, it was because I had more pressing work to take care of (in fact, it was applying to the Generator Residency, my current job!), but also, I realized something quite disheartening: I don’t have any junior friends that I would be especially excited to see or spend time with at junior formal. Actually, I don’t really have a group of friends that I’d be really excited to rally together to head out to functions or go on adventures with. Obviously, I have many friends that I enjoy spending time with. But when we’re talking about those reels of people doing intense lifts or ludicrous challenges or cool photoshoots or random adventures, or even just those hiking reels on Instagram… I don’t feel like I have those people in my life, at least not people that excite me to the level that these Instagram reels do.

Maybe this is Instagram being the highlight reel of the highlight people. But I do think this is attainable. In SMT, and scattered friends across campus, I have had fleeting glimpses of highlight reels to be had. I’ve thrown parties, hosted events, organized socials, connected people, and come to see that I have the privilege and ability to create this world for myself. Thinking about this often makes me feel my version of regret, seeing underclassman revel in the joys of the culture and events that I’ve organized and wishing that I had had the opportunity to experience the same. But I am merely a junior, I have yet another year, I can build myself the life I wish, and life indeed does go on after Stanford.

Moving Forward

This article was written much more for myself than to actually post, but I think I’ll publish it anyways, despite the tangled and disjointed threads throughout. I think I’ll try to get ahead on work in the next few days then build slack into my schedule so that I have time and space for depth and resonance, and I need to learn to stop saying yes to everyone who asks me to share my time.

In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy the rest of the quarter with its amazing vibes, and I hope to continue to cultivate and grow them.

A Brag Reel of What I Got Up To Spring Quarter

At this point, these posts are de facto recaps of my quarters.

• Ran a marathon with minimal training (I ran my first half marathon a month prior, and went on eight more runs for total volume of 18.48 miles run before my marathon. I was in absolute shock). Afterwards, I remember being in awe of myself. I distinctly remember what I internalized that day. “Pain is just signal in the body. You can ignore signals from the body. You are capable of so much more than you imagine.” (Obviously don’t be stupid and please be careful)
• Helped run the Stanford Math Tournament’s largest iteration (>700 students) which was an absolute blast and helped me fall in love with my fellow organizers
• Started running banger socials for Stanford Math Tournament because I loved them so much
• Hosted my first birthday party with friends since middle school! I felt so joyous and loved, and I also realized that hosting events for my friends is extremely gratifying!
• Tried pottery for the first time! I successfully created absolutely nothing but still had a great time. I was reminded of how much I love physical activities
• Went to (probably my last) SMT retreat, and stayed up until 7:30AM playing castle fall and talking with my friends and playing Animenz covers and playing foosball and … I don’t really remember that night too well to be honest but it was great
• Flew home to surprise my mom for her birthday!
• Learned my first social dance choreo (which was the beginning of what killed my sleep schedule, because rehearsal from 7-9PM would become more social dancing until 11PM which would become late night In-N-Out until 1AM which would become yapping until 5AM) and performed it at Stanford’s annual Big Dance, and then danced from 11PM-6AM the rest of that night!
• Went to Bay to Breakers for the first time!
• Generally spent wayyyy too much time with SMT and social dance people, and way too little time studying for my finals…

I probably will talk about this in another post, but I think I got burnt out from socializing so much this quarter. My terribly solitary winter quarter turned into a feverishly social spring quarter, and I’ve been swinging too far at the extremes. This summer, I hope to maintain a better balance, and I’m really excited to doggedly pursue self-development while still making space for my hobbies and friends. I suppose only time will tell, but right now, I feel limitless.