curiosity

Somewhere To Belong.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

I was going through some memories on Facebook this morning and came across something I’d written 2 years ago:

“Sometimes, when looking back, you’ll see that nothing ‘went wrong’ but [as much as] sometimes it just wasn’t right to begin with.

As you grow older, ‘sometimes’ increases significantly.”

I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote that. It could have been anything in my past, a past of places, times, and different versions of me.

At the time, too, I was listening to Linkin Park’s “Somewhere to Belong”.

“Somewhere To Belong”, Linkin Park, with lyrics.

It doesn’t always occur to us, we who search for a place to belong, that maybe we aren’t meant to belong, that we are supposed to be in motion, and the yearning to belong gives us itchy feet.

This could explain how humans all wandered off from South Africa – if people felt like they belonged, they would not have left. Maybe there wasn’t enough food. Maybe there weren’t enough women. Maybe someone’s intelligence or lack thereof didn’t allow them to fit in. Maybe they were just jerks.

When I did a google search on “feelings of not belonging”, you find things on mental health – actually, some pretty good stuff that could be possible for an individual. I liked this response to ‘a feeling of not belonging’ here, and there are enough legitimate answers that if you really feel like you don’t belong, you should talk to a psychologist. I did, though not about that particular thing – but I addressed it and it’s not that I am off my rocker.

Sometimes you just don’t belong where you are, literally or figuratively.

We come from thousands of years of change, perhaps even billions of years depending on your perspective, but we only see a lifetime’s worth, a very small fraction of who we are. We are inherently wanderers, this stacking of people on top of each other is pretty new to humanity. Most religious texts have people wandering around somewhere, maybe even all of them.

Some people do not want to wander, they want to stay where they are. I used to think they were the crazy ones. In some ways, I still do, those who are happy with routine and the same ideas and thoughts comforting them like a blanket, but we are told these days that that is normal.

Part of me wants to say that society has normalized this, and maybe that’s true to an indeterminate degree, but if that were true then every city would be filled with crazy people. Some think that’s the case, but I elect to believe that statistically, cities show the significance of wanting to stay in one place in an undeniable way.

Both can be completely normal.

I’ve always had itchy feet myself, always wanting to explore a place or an idea, and part of that could be associated with my childhood, but really, it’s just who I am. I don’t want to see the same things, hear the same things, smell the same things over and over and over. I don’t fit in with people who do not have that feeling, and I shouldn’t – they are happy as they are. They are not curious. They are not explorers. They are settlers, and that’s an important aspect of being human.

Wanderers, though, seem also to be natural. While feelings of alienation or not belonging can be symptoms of legitimate mental health concerns, sometimes it’s natural. I love the feel of motion, I love the wind through my hair. I love learning new things.

For me, it’s when I can’t experience something new that I feel trapped. That paralysis and being imprisoned can also feel like much the same thing, but they are not the same. The former is done to one’s self, the other by others. The hint here is that there’s only one person you can control. Yourself.

The trouble is how we frame ourselves and are framed by others in these disagreements we call life.

Looking for somewhere to belong can just be an excuse to do something different. Go somewhere different. Experience something different.

And yeah, it is worth checking with a mental health practitioner. Probably the easiest medical people to deal with.

End of an Era: Kevin Mitnick

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Many people may not even know who Kevin Mitnick was, and it’s a little sad to note that because he was probably one of the most interesting characters in my lifetime to push back on technology even while pushing it. He certainly lived his life his way.

I do believe that he was the first person to be accused of being addicted to computers. He certainly was one of the most famous, if not the most famous.

…Mr. Mitnick was a heavyset and lonely boy who, by the age of 12, had figured out how to freely ride the bus using a $15 punch card and blank tickets fished from a dumpster. In high school he developed an obsession with the inner workings of the switches and circuits of telephone companies. He pulled pranks at a high level, managing to program the home phone of someone he did not like so that each time the line was answered, a recording asked for a deposit of 25 cents.

He showed a willingness to violate the law flagrantly, breaking into a Pacific Bell office as a teenager and stealing technical manuals.

In the late 1980s, he was convicted twice of hacking into corporate computer systems, leading to time in prison and counseling for addiction to computers…

Alex Traub, “Kevin Mitnick, Once the ‘Most Wanted Computer Outlaw,’ Dies at 59“, New York Times, July 20th, 2023.

He and I were not unlike each other in some ways, which is probably why I kept track of him over the years. I was never as notorious or famous, but there was a curious playfulness to him that I knew all too well as I had it too. My pranks, though, never got me tracked by the FBI, or got me put in prison because I didn’t really ever go beyond harmless pranks. Like him, too, I never did it for profit, either. I did it because I wanted to see if I knew the system, or to help me know a system, or to point out to those who should know better that their systems were flawed. Maybe, in that regard, we had some commonality.

That curious playfulness, I think, has a place in the world. I think he demonstrated both extremes of it at different points of his life, and I consider that a noteworthy contribution.

The Curiosity Habit.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
_web_Curious Boy

Growing up in the 1970s in suburban Ohio, we had back yards and places we could get to with our bicycles that allowed us a sense of freedom curtailed only by street lights. I recall being more afraid of what my father would do if I got hurt more than any actual hurt, so my friends and I had to be careful.

Within suburbia, the houses hiding under different colors of paint all looked the same, for the most part. Trees were different in yards, and required inspection as far up them as we could get, with bird’s nests and cocoons among the many hidden treasures we found.

Trees. Bugs. Magnifying glasses. Microscopes. Chemistry sets. It was a golden age of exploration for we of that time.

For some, it died. Maybe it was displaced by structured education systems. Maybe the pursuit of red dots gave us no time to do it. But many of us lost that curiosity of the world and we found the best way to understand it was static, unchanging, when the world is dynamic and changing.

When’s the last time you indulged your curiosity? Aren’t you overdue? Go explore something.