confidence, pt. 2

1. In order to make any real progress, one needs to be comfortable enough to realize that uprooting what he finds familiar will not destroy him. In other words, he needs to realize that action on those things most dear to him will only shake him briefly. By doing so, he can make priorities without being trapped. A man once told me that to be in love is to be under control. But true love requires the opposite – it requires that one is fully in control of oneself but devoted because he chooses to. Anything else that we dare call love is at least partially controlled by lust and fear.

2. In New York, no one is worth anyone’s time unless there is a great, proximate reason. Having one pick up your newspaper is only an excuse to talk – it is not a reason to interact. In Paris, though, people walk straight at each other, diverting their paths only right before (and sometimes without avoiding) a crash. And similarly, in Paris people look straight at you, with self-confidence and confidence in you. This is the old American ideal that Walt Whitman wrote about. It’s high time we earned it back.

3. I’ve, while waiting for a friend to show up, been extremely quiet here. The main reason for this is my inability to communicate in this language, but I’ve also made no effort to meet practically anyone in my hostel. I wander the streets, sometimes directed and confident, sometimes down and lost. But the buildings, the art, the statues, the drainage, the green of the street workers, the zillions of cafés, the accents and apostrophes on French signs – all that care and devotion to things that have no up-front measurable value – all remind me that I have a capability, a desire, and an obligation to take such care in my own life. So we should not pretend, as so many do, that dressing well or extolling one’s own culture while remaining ambivalent about others is pompous or prideful. We can pretend that the little things do not matter – that art and the humanities and color and elegance are just-so-happens – but this is denying those things I think are most universal after the basic necessities (food; water; shelter; basic hygiene).

4. As countries with labor willing to work more hours and for less pay begin to compete with places like this which heavily regulates employment, it becomes more difficult for companies to justify doing business here. That’s not to say that such an advanced country doesn’t maintain huge advantages over others – it’s only to say that people who have enjoyed a stable social-democratic state for the past 50 years or are beginning to face some turmoil. Well, they already have, obviously. Immigrants have it tough here, and locals aren’t huge fans of them, particularly those that hail from Muslim countries. It’s definitely a clash of ideals and ways of life as well as of purely economic impacts on each.