Being-in-the-world

For a few days now, I've been meaning to make a post on this subject. Quite a few posts ago, when I was prattling on about friendship, I wrote about how my friend Jackson and I are searching for our place in the world Vs. just a place in the world. There is a fundamental error in that statement though, and I'm embarassed that I made it. First to correct the statement, and then to explain the error. Jackson and I are each trying our best to authentically become the future "me" that we each feel we should be. There are choices in our lives that we make, and the choices most often are choices between what do I do Vs. what do "they" do. I, as well as Jackson (and I continue to use him as an example simply because he was the original example) attempt to make my own choices, rather than the one's I'm supposed to make.

The error comes from the fact that it's almost redundant to find my place in the world (or along similarly cliched lines, find myself.) My place in the world is here. I am already in the world. To try to find a place for myself implies that I'm living somewhere outside the world. And, I felt the need to make this correction, because I think a lot of people do feel that way. They see the world as something external to them, and them to it. They believe they are somehow different from the world. We are not. We are born into the system that is this world, and if we are to survive in it, we have no choice but to live from within it. It is not something we know innately, but something we are taught. We are born into the system of traffic lights, of speaking a certain language, of moving and sitting certain ways. We have no choice but to behave in these ways, if we want to survive. How far will you get in life speaking a language you made up? How long will you live if you drive on the left side of the road (in the U.S.) and ignore red lights?

Unfortunately, it is things like this that make it impossible for us to be completely unique; completely original; completely individual. We have no choice about the world we are born into. The very nature of our existence is always, already, being-in-the-world. But from within this framework we can make our own choices. We can drive a gas-guzzling SUV, a high-powered sports car, or an economical compact. We can learn different languages. And we can follow the career paths and life choices that seem to suit us best. But what we can not do, is find our place in the world, or make a place for ourselves in the world. We're already there.