I don’t know if I’ve ever found anything to dedicate myself to. And I find this irritating. Very irritating. Or maybe I find disappointment in this fact about myself. This feeling, it definitely lays somewhere between irritation and disappointment. It’s similar to the feeling I get when I’m in an argument with someone I love, and I secretly already know they are right, but have yet to concede the point.
I think dedication relates to one’s narrative being satisfying. Narrative I mean as in someones perceived experience of events that have taken them through some section of time. Under this definition, someone can have multiple narratives for themselves that overlap, contradict, or otherwise mingle along a neural path, like contagions rapidly traveling along curved vectors from Patient Zero. I imagine a map that somehow represents all that I could be, with a series of subway map like features indicating my conscious narratives.
And I’m jealous of people that are dedicated because it allows them to drive into the walls of their narrative. While I think we are discrete in a mathematical sense (Zeno cuts things down to be a bit too small for my tastes), there is a continuity of a narrative involving something like a hallway. We stand at a door — an event — and peer out it, down a hallway, to see another door; the place where this particular narrative ends.
The linoleum tile in this hallway is like any other, and the task of walking from Door A to Door B is unremarkable if all I did was focus on the tile. It is in the walls where there is density; where posters hang, or maybe some old plumbing ruptured and has caused the drywall to slump and if I run and jump, I get swallowed up into a world of plumbing and childhood dreams of Super Mario Brothers. These walls are everything if we focus on them: see them as a permeable boundary. See them as a uterine wall that is spongy and supple and available for life. Remember the space between each finish, and the heat that travels through them at rates depending on r-values and material conductivity. It depends on electricity in a basic way. Electrons skipping along with an excitability of dogs released from a cage that have been needing to pee for hours on end.
Dedication! Dedication is the ability to drive into the walls of narrative. To be precise and exacting in being able to describe and live between push tacks and poorly painted trim; to see 1000 years in-between a fire alarm and an overhead florescent light.
I wish for dedication, because I wish for a narrative with infinite density. Or whatever is as close to that as possible. I want a narrative that is hard to tell if it is longer than it is wide, because the space it contains is both bounded and impossible to define.
But I think a lot of days I only see linoleum tiles.