When one throws a punch with the aim to hit something, the power stops on the target. There may be an effect — a bruise, a curse, a retaliatory blow — but that is all.

When one punches with the intention of sending force through the target, the impact is different. The consequences are more severe — internal bleeding, a broken bone, a windedness that makes cursing and retaliation rather difficult.

Thought about from this perspective, one wonders if the first even deserves the same noun as the second.

That is the difference between how I used to engage with my internal and external worlds and how I approach the same now. Before, when I say I know something it meant I had read scientific reports and research studies, I consulted philosophical and artistic representations, I have thought about doing something and perhaps even visualized its application. I read signs and believed them without driving down the roads to see for myself.

In my mind, being a writer equated to being a lover of words and typewriters; being a Christian meant believing certain things about God and holding myself to a certain moral creed; being myself meant ensuring the idea of me in my head is the same as the idea of me in other people’s minds.

Do you see the problem? It is pathetic, dishonest, infantile.

I would have ideals of what to be, to do, to say — be more thankful, feel joy, help others, be more efficient, use my brain; and yet I would only aim to make contact with the surface of the target. I gave thanks for a situation, but not for every nuance and shade of beauty I could sense within, from, and around it; I felt joy, but questioned and held at bay those peripheral, inexplicable shards of emotion that seemed irrational; I served with half-an-eye on the clock and only half-a-heart towards the people before me; I had lists upon lists of things to do but never asked myself if the lists themselves were the ball-and-chain I was trying to schedule my way out of; I would stay up late squeezing the last bit of analytical attention from my poor cranium without asking if I was giving my brain the nutrients, inspiration, and rest it needed to function.

Kinda stupid, to say the least. One might as well liken such “punches” to a pat on the back, or a tickle. Enough pressure to be noticed, but it does not do much.

At some point, I had enough of the acting. If God exists, I shall wrestle with him, I shall ask questions of him, I shall live as though he is real and not simply claim salvation through static belief in dogma. If I am to write, I shall put words together and tear them apart and put them together again until they make sense, until they sing, until they reflect my inner world with as much honesty and clarity and thoroughness as I could possibly infuse them with. If I am human, I shall be one without apology, without pretending to operate at the level of God or an animal or a demon, without berating myself for the time-locked nature of my awareness and actions, without cursing the darkness nor flinching from the light.

The more I observe the way conscious human existence is mapped out in reality in relation to self and all that is not-self, the more I realize this one little detail of thoroughness is at the core of honesty, integrity, and enduring love. To love only what is lovable is not love; to say only what is easy for another to hear is not honesty; to match words with deeds only when it is convenient to do so is not integrity.

In the same way, to believe in something without knowing what it means to live as though that belief is true, or to believe in it without knowing what it actually means or why it is to be believed in, is not belief — it is wishful thinking or plain ignorance or worse, self-deception.

…Then again, I look stupid to others for not taking a “no exit” sign at face value. When I make a mistake, it is thorough and honest — there is no excuse behind which to hide or explain myself away. Not comfortable. But I prefer wholehearted mistakes over almost-trying ones, so there you go.

Roads are paved for a reason, people remind me; shoes exist, as do rules and expectations — you will waste resources and destroy all hope for your future if you treat everything like you must experience it for yourself before you believe something about it. This, that, and the other is what you should do, that is how you win at life.

(Here I bite back the retort, “…says the armchair quarterback.”)

On the one hand, I apparently do not use my brain nor learn my lessons; on the other, I think myself past three times my biological age and therefore overwork my limited supply of neurons. There must be something wrong with this approach to the world, this scampering over boulders in bare feet and the laughing as I tumble down the side of a mountain — the motivation is too subjective, the approach too intense, the consequences too real.

To some people, their whole idea of how a decision is made is limited to internal rumination, mostly in the brain and sometimes the heart. That is, for all they care, how people know things and learn things and make up their minds.

I listen, then shake my bobblehead with a laugh, and gesture at the vast expanse of reality with one grand flick of the wrist: no no no, dear sir and madam, there are three at play here, not one. Knowledge, wisdom and ability come from the convergence of the brain, the body, and the external world — if any one of those are missing you cannot learn, or think, or make a decision. It is not only through the brain that thoughts are thought: give this thought another thought, and you begin to sense insanity.

One simply does not smarten-up through thinking twice before doing something, or by following signs. They become smart after first learning what there is to think about through engaging with the world through their bodies, then thinking and acting on what was learned.

Pausing to think does no good when one does not have a thing to think about.

Engagement with the world beyond our heads requires acceptance of risk, unknown, and discomfort. Reality kicks you down when you pour effort into something; life laughs in your face when you give a damn; natural laws show you most bridges built in your head crumble at a touch. It is annoying not to know; it hurts to stumble and fall.

Thus discomfort and uncertainty are to be avoided, concludes the default settings of many. In much of society, that default seems normal and accepted. To become an individual who thrives in the not-knowing and takes a certain joy and pride in remaining in discomfort just to see something through, is to become a black sheep that glories in its discovery of color and the realization that so much of its being is defined by its choice to perceive and act on one’s perceptions.

It is dangerous to let the misty smoke of all the pretty matching white sheepies dissipate, though. As I demand thoroughness in every last thought, belief, feeling, speech, and action, the glittering veneer on the décor of my life falls away and I see the raw materials of my human existence for what they are –habits that treat the body like a pigsty instead of a temple because I do not see myself as worthy of consistent love and respect, mind-patterns that flinch from questions and I-don’t-knows when to think is to take responsibility, feelings that tear and destroy and yet are fed because they are the world I have grown accustomed to.

And so we splinter our hearts into a hundred different pieces and give bits of it to this person, to that field, to this thought, to that belief. That way we would not risk having our hearts broken all at once, we would never care all and fully for one thing, we would never know the joy of thoroughness in loving and living (though it be three-parts pain, as Browning says).

We cut up the one egg we have and place it in different baskets so that it would not break all at once. And we wonder why we end up with empty, dried-up shells…

I dub that a “special kind of stupid.”

I used to wonder what wanting something and seeking something with the entirety of one’s being felt like. People like this are rare — it is a scary thing to do, it is a fearful thing to witness. It is curiosity, it is vulnerability, it is desire, obsession, a throwing of one’s self into the pursuit of another. It means punching not only to make impact, but punching through to the other side. It requires both a will of steel and a heart of love, and a living soul that marries the two.

But I have seen it lived out. It is possible. I fall short of my own standards, but now I am closer than I used to be. And call it idealistic or irrational to demand from myself this level of thoroughness in every aspect of being, but I hesitate to call any other way of existence “living.”