To Fight Tomorrow

And as I go to bed bruised beaten bleeding from a small cut and exhausted (fencing tournament), I realize that tomorrow morning I have to get up and go do battle – not physical this time, but more, not less, important. My thoughts at the moment are a bit scattered, so forgive… no, nevermind, I have no apologies. Read on or leave – it is what it is.

Human nature is such that we see more clearly, or perhaps just in a prettier white glow, the state of the world as it could be, should be, rather than how it currently is. Don’t deny it. Even the homeless man dreams of a future where his bottle of liquor is full.

We want a world is which we are at the top of the silly little hierarchies we deem important. It’s more accurate to say though, that we dream of being at the top of the most important hierarchy we think we have a shot of summiting. Some wish to be Secretary of State, others captain of the bowling team.

But it isn’t meant to be. There’s always some hotshot young upstart who needs to be crushed under a jackboot or perhaps more charitably turned into an ally. Always someone above whose favor hasn’t been sufficiently curried. Entropy is inexorable yet we fight on to manipulate the system state into what we had hoped to see originally. So we draw up these battle plans to gain the respect, affection, or material of someone relevant to our new world order – and tomorrow we fight.

None of the above is terribly insightful, just hard to read. But I do have two questions:

1. Some people seek out these fights, others avoid them. Which is the correct strategy?
2. We often commit ourselves into long-term campaigns – perhaps a job or a hobby, and while initially our enthusiasm and ambitions are great, in the end, we realize that real world constraints lead us to do a substantially more mediocre and less dramatic job than we had hoped. Should we just quit those and only fight the battles that we have our hearts in? Or should we soldier on?
3. I have fought to make this post good yet it is imperfect… Should I hit “Post” anyways and hope to make a better post some other day? Or should I just delete this thing? Well I guess I chose.