How to Be a Good Tester on the Journey of a Lifetime for You – The Marginalian

Life is a continuous journey to our bramble wilderness, always haunted by everything we have wrong with the destination – success, superpowers, someone else's love. Along the way, we continue to confuse testing with testing. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; Its payment is data, fixed and binary. Exploring is crossing into the unknown, into places you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience necessary; its advantage is the discovery – of unimaginable miracles, itself in the face of the unimaginable. Discovery, in its pure form, is nothing less than revelation.

On the pages of his posthumously published artwork A Letter of Sorrow (public library), poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) considers the complex question of self-discovery. You write:

Eternal travelers ourselves, there is no world but what we are. We have nothing, because we do not behave. We have nothing because we are nothing. To what hand shall I extend, and to what heaven? The universe is not mine: it is me.

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It's all up to us – all we have to do is look at it and know what it looks like.

It is possible that we do not know what we look like because we look like tourists – tourists passing through our outer spaces – rather than explorers. The spirit of exploration is something else entirely, which requires a complete acceptance of experience – a mind unbound by expectations and normality, an animal sense space fully open to every path of life, a soul ready for the revelation of discovery.

Pessoa gives a set of short, fiery instructions to himself on how to achieve such an acceptance of revelation:

Hearing everything in every way; being able to think with feelings and hear with the mind; not wishing much without thought; suffering with pride; to see clearly to write accurately; mastery of diplomacy and hypocrisy; to be naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all the feelings but only inside, I strip them all down to God and wrap everything up again and return it to the shop window like the sales assistant I see here with small cans of a new brand of shoe polish.

Such a raw acceptance is the only truth of the universe without saving us from losing the vision of the universe within. Consciousness may be the tool the universe invented to look into itself, but it's a flawed tool that constantly changes the lens — the price of self-awareness. Like the fatal flaw that plagues the Greek hero, our greatest strength is also the source of our greatest suffering. Looking at this terrible flaw of the human animal, Pessoa comments:

To stop trying to understand, to stop analyzing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to see our ideas as we see the field — that is true wisdom.

Couple that with Pessoa about not giving up who you really are, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir's instructions on how to live life and Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a perfect person.