Optimistic Exhaustion

I am having a hard time putting together a really coherent thought right now. But lately I've been struggling to cope with the sheer volume of thoughts and emotions I've been experiencing, and putting any kind of structure around them is a challenge. A big theme is the way I set hopes and expectations for my life. I feel a lot of dissatisfaction, a longing for more, and the prevailing message I keep seeing people playing back in the world around me is, "At some point, you just have to settle and accept the way things are. Calm down, appreciate what you have, don't ask for more." The thing that makes it hard is that I do feel like I have a lot to be grateful for, but I am still unhappy in some big ways. And I think ultimately I'm an optimist, because I do believe that things can be better than they are, that there's a purpose in reaching for more. And I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. But there's something unsettling in optimism, too, because often people have to let go of "good" before they can achieve "great" -- the true test of optimism I guess. And if there's anything I'm learning, it's that life isn't tidy and there aren't guarantees, but that anything really worthwhile requires some risk and investment of oneself. This realization makes me feel perpetually exhausted lately, but I'm hopeful that it will eventually lead somewhere lovely and fulfilling. I think this is something like what President Obama has referred to as "the audacity of hope".

On a somewhat tangential but I think still related note, the Rushdie book I'm reading now, Fury, has a lot for me to think about and a lot that I relate to. There are a lot of quotable excerpts, but here's just one reflection on America (published in 2001) that I keep rereading. It's long, but this kind of reflection on the state of human affairs is why I'm in love with Rushdie:

In spite of all the chatter, all the diagnosis, all the new consciousness, the most powerful communications made by this new, much-articulated national self were inarticulate. For the real problem was damage not to the machine but to the desirous heart, and the language of the heart was being lost. An excess of this heart damage was the issue, not muscle tone, not food, neither feng shui nor karma, neither godlessness nor God. This was the Jitter Bug that made people mad: excess not of commodities but of their dashed and thwarted hopes. Here in Boom America, the real-life manifestation of Keats' fabulous realms of gold, here in the doubloon-heavy pot at the rainbow's end, human expectations were at the highest levels in human history, and so, therefore, were human disappointments. When arsonists lit fires that burned the West, when a man picked up a gun and started killing strangers, when a child picked up a gun and started killing friends, when lumps of concrete smashed the skulls of rich young women, this disappointment for which the word "disappointment" was too weak was the engine driving the killers' tongue-tied expressiveness. This was the only subject: the crushing of dreams in a land where the right to dream was the national ideological cornerstone, the pulverizing cancellation of personal possibility at a time when the future was opening up to reveal vistas of unimaginable, glittering treasures such as no man or woman had ever dreamed of before. In the tormented flames and anguished bullets Malik Solanka heard a crucial, ignored, unanswered, perhaps unanswerable question -- the same question, loud and life-shattering as a Munch scream, that he had just asked himself: is this all there is? What, this is it? This is it?