What More Could You Ask For?

November 23, 2023

The other day as I was walking around the park, admiring the mist rising from the lake in the early sunlight, I sent a text to my friend that read, “the only truly meaningful activity in life is just walking around.” A few minutes later, I received a reply in which he said that he essentially agreed, although he would add listening to music to the list as well, and that conveniently enough you can do both at the same time. I had in fact been listening to music as I walked around that morning, so I couldn’t help but agree with my friend’s addition. As I put my phone back in my pocket, I thought, ‘Well, there you go. What more could you ask for?’

Not only was I walking around listening to music, appreciating how nice it is to walk around and listen to music, but I had also received written verification that a good friend of mine appreciates this combination of activities just as much as I do. Physically, socially, intellectually, and spiritually, I was fully satisfied. What else can we call this but absolute contentment?

When I investigate my life in any serious manner, I always come to the conclusion that I have everything I need. I’ve thought this for quite a long time, long before I had half of what I have now. Since I first left my parent’s house and moved into a half-basement where I sustained myself on lentils and cabbages for most of a year, I have constantly interrogated myself regarding what I consider my basic needs. I’ve always thought in terms of less, not more. Rather than aspiring after a larger living space, I considered how much smaller I could possibly go.

That being said, I never did go smaller. My apartments since have grown only larger and higher, until now I have a full-sized window in all three rooms. There is not a day when I don’t appreciate the spaciousness and luxuriousness of this apartment, despite the fact that it’s old and looks crummy no matter how often you clean it. I no longer eat lentils for two-thirds of my meals, but it’s nice to know that I could if I had to.

A few months after I moved into that half-basement, it rained every day for an entire month. The man in the other half of the basement, which thankfully was not connected to our half (I shared my half-basement with my brother), liked to scream and pound on the walls, and if I saw him outside he would rant incomprehensibly and threateningly about how I was trying to get him evicted. I walked to work every day, in the rain, got soaked because I didn’t quite know how to use an umbrella, and worked at my fruit store where I didn’t know anyone and couldn’t understand their conversations even if I tried. Around this period was the only period in my life where I semi-regularly drank alcohol by myself.

I was unhappy. I was unhappy, I had been unhappy for quite some time, and I felt that I would continue to be unhappy until the day I died. At the same time, I felt that I had gotten exactly what I wanted and exactly what I deserved, because I hated happiness as much as I hated everything else people aspired to.

Alone in my room, and behind the cash register at work, I talked to my friends in California and in Kamloops. They were unhappy, too, and between the four of us, we surmised that probably most everyone in this whole wide world was unhappy, and many of them evil and strange on top. We chased after phantoms — usually in the form of fictional or unreachable women — and fantasies — usually in the form of being fired from a cannon, crushed by a domino, or locked away in a cave. The ideal was non-existence, but of course, you have to have a sense of humour about these things, so the specific path to and nature of our personal non-existences took the form of increasingly absurd scenarios.

Never did we aspire after anything resembling a normal life. We never said, “I want a job and a house,” and when we said we wanted a wife, we meant that we wanted to marry a K-pop idol or a beautiful stranger we’d passed on the street, for we knew that we had no hope of forging any sort of real relationship. Our vision of the future was that the world would either explode or that we, the four of us, would explode within it, the latter probably being best for all involved.

Thankfully, we are all doing much better now, partially because we couldn’t get much worse. But I don’t think we got better in spite of our moping and our hopelessness, but in fact precisely because of it.

The truth that we all understood was that we had what we needed. We could all afford to live and to eat, to entertain ourselves with books and video games, and to top it all off, we had the deepest companionship one could ask for: that of young men with not a hope in the world. And none of us had to struggle particularly hard for any of it; our jobs were boring and soul-crushing, but they weren’t difficult by any means. We had come upon our particular lifestyles by systematically abandoning other more highly-regarded and well-trod paths.

Casting aside this temporary “we” and speaking for myself, I had made the conscious decision to neglect higher education for the simple fact that it didn’t agree with me, knowing full well that this limited my options in the future. To my mind, all those options I was cutting off were undesirable. I didn’t want those futures. I knew that people committed themselves to the inanity of the workplace because they wanted money to buy things, but I didn’t want the things that money bought, and so it all seemed like a waste of my time.

The question that I couldn’t answer was what I was possibly supposed to do instead. I could afford rent and food and the occasional luxury (a video game, a subscription to the Crossword puzzle, a book), but there were still plenty of hours left in the day and years left in my life, and people kept asking me what I was going to do and I could see in their eyes that “just hang out” wasn’t going to be an acceptable answer.

Thus began my quest to answer the question of how I’m supposed to continue living for however long I’m going to live despite having no aspirations or hopes for the future and not thinking I deserved any more than what I had. Told that I shouldn’t be satisfied, I looked around for what I could change.

By my nature, I fear change. For better or for worse, my expectation and hope is generally that everything about my life will stay exactly as it is, regardless of how bad that may be. As such, there’s little room in my heart for ambition.

My greatest strength is a bizarre and perhaps stupid form of resilience. While I fear change, I do not fight it when it comes, but instead adapt myself to the new situation. When I moved from my parent’s townhouse to half of a basement, it didn’t take long for me to come to the conclusion that my previous living space had been altogether too big, and the new situation perfectly suited my needs. When I found myself with little happiness and little hope, I decided that happiness was stupid, and that I had no need for hope.

Over time, I learned to live with less and less. Less money, less space, less food, less acknowledgement, less purpose. A part of me wanted to see how far I could go. I was reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame the other day with my wife, and she mentioned that when she first read the book, she idolized the life of the young woman who barricaded herself in a tiny cell and lived off scraps pushed through the bars. I can see the appeal of such simplicity; the benefit of suffering to such an extent is that you at least know things can’t get any worse. That sounds like a joke, but that really is the appeal of such things.

When I think about that, and then I think about a life of striving and chasing, of the euphoria of success and the despair of failure interlocked in an endless dance, I can not help but feel inclined toward immobility and inaction. And “inclined” is the right word, because if I cast all of everything aside and get down to my true nature, I will without fail find myself rolling down that hill.

There is a certain strength in no desire. One becomes impervious to tribulation and approaches a state of absolute fearlessness. However, it feels somehow wrong that such a state should even be possible. At that point, what are you? A person? Or an object?

Of course, I could probably never reach such a state. Something held me back, and it took me a long time to realize what exactly that was.

Contrary to my understanding, I was not wholly without ambition. I did have one dream. I had accepted at some point in the past that this dream was impossible, and so I had attempted to kill it dead in my heart. When I inventoried my life, comparing what I had to what I needed, I left it out. I left it out in the same way that I left out my desire to be shot into space, or marry the main character of an anime. But it wasn’t like those silly dreams of an idle mind, because when I did let myself dwell briefly and nocturnally on its absence, it struck me simply and undeniably that I would be ashamed to die or even to live with it left undone.

I thought, after receiving my friend’s text, putting my phone in my pocket, and thinking, 'What more could you ask for?' of the moment that I completed my first novel. No one had read it yet, and I had no idea if anyone would ever consider it meaningful or worthwhile. But I knew that I had done it, and in that moment I was no longer afraid of being hit by lightning or run over by a truck, because I could now imagine the following conversation at my funeral:

“So, what was that guy up to the whole time?”

“Well, he did write that book.”

If I never get to finish my next book, I still have that first one. If I never get more readers than the few who saw something in that book, then I still have those few. I reached out to the world and said, “Here I am,” and they said, “There you are.” What more could you ask for?

That novel and my text to my friend are two instances of the same phenomenon: a more or less simple recognition of our shared humanity. I don’t think there’s much more to art than that, regardless of the form it takes; what varies is the specificity of this recognition.

A text or a post on social media about a common experience or feeling is pleasant, but often shallow and fleeting. In the same way, I can listen to Modest Mouse when they sing,

So you go to the library to get yourself a book

And you look and you look

But you didn't find anything to read

and think, “Yeah, I’ve done that.” And it’s kind of funny and nice to think about the fact that both of us have done that, but it’s about half as memorable as other lyrics of theirs which at first glance don’t seem to make sense or even refer to anything.

The former expresses a sentiment that can be expressed in plain language. He went to the library, looked around, but couldn’t find a book he was interested in. There’s a connotation of dissatisfaction and melancholy attached to the event, but for the most part, I hear the words and I think about going to the library.

However, there are sentiments that can’t be expressed in plain language at all, and these are generally what people are trying to get at when they create a piece of art. When I was at the park and I saw the mist rising from the lake, I thought of a painting I once saw of mist rising from a lake, and I thought, “That person liked this too.” It’s not just that they liked it, but that it spoke to them enough that they devoted themselves to recreating it. They were passionate about this image, this phenomenon, and that passion couldn’t be communicated fully by simply saying, “I like seeing mist rise from the lake,” but had to be communicated via the effort of painting it. At the same time, what they are communicating is not necessarily the image of mist rising from a lake, but their reaction to the mist rising from a lake, and the form and style of their painting will ideally nudge the viewer toward this particular reaction, or at least one similar.

There is always a risk when making art of not being understood, and the more complicated the feeling you’re trying to express, and therefore the more experimental and abstract your expression must be, the less likely it is that people will understand. When attempting to communicate with pinpoint precision — via what appears to be vague abstraction — there is a sense in which the person on the other end has to bear a great resemblance to you in terms of temperament and range of experience.

The difficulty and rarity of success is what makes such success so satisfying. The worst feeling in the world is when someone you believe should understand just doesn’t get it. It means that at some point there has been a failure of communication; either you didn’t express yourself effectively, or they didn’t open their heart enough to accept you.

The absolutely dismal nature of such failures means that it’s safer and easier to stick to a more superficial level, to appeal to the most basic experiences and feelings that we all share and understand. If you ask someone whether they are a human, likely they will answer “Yes,” and if you consider yourself a human too, then you’ve made the most superficial of connections. However, what this question and thereby its answer don’t communicate is what either interlocutor means by being human, or to put it another way, what being a human means to them.

To gain any satisfaction at all, we must go deeper and ask more specific questions, questions that can’t be written out in a simple sentence. These questions end up taking the form of stories in which specific events happen to particular people. But at the end, what this question can be boiled down to is “Does anybody experience the world the way I do?” which is another way of asking, “Am I a human being?”

The reader, if they answer this question in the affirmative, are performing a two-fold action: on the one hand, they are acknowledging the author’s humanity; on the other hand, they are acknowledging the author’s recognition of their humanity. Because by understanding the artist, you are affirming that the artist has, theoretically at least, understood you.

My first novel asked such a particular question, a question that I had never attempted to formulate and is near to what I consider the essential nature of my being. When the answer came through in the affirmative, I thought, ‘Well, there you go. What more could you ask for?’

But I do keep asking, in one form or the other. With each piece of writing I am asking: I’m human, right? I exist, right? You can see me? You can recognize me? I keep proclaiming, proudly or ashamedly, “Here I am!” just to hear that reassuring, “There you are” that lets me get on with my day.

This satisfies a need that I had previously failed to acknowledge. It goes beyond the bare essentials of survival; instead, it is what allows the very possibility of happiness, or of hope. I remain unambitious; I don’t write in order to bolster my ego or spread my influence. Instead, I write in order to fulfill my side of the contract: to facilitate this two-fold recognition between reader and writer.

What more could I ask for? To recognize and be recognized is one of life’s great satisfactions. I sit here content, knowing that I’ve done my best to communicate myself to the world, for better or for ill. No one can tell me that I haven’t done enough, or that I should wish for more. Why wish, why strive upwards and forwards, when one can instead dream laterally, horizontally, toward distant and level horizons? I aspire for naught, and yet I continue to move upward, continue to levitate upon the air that grows ever lighter beneath my feet, continue toward the clouds and toward the skies…

And thus we say:

BALCKWELL RISING!!