{"id":11704,"date":"2025-10-13T18:53:51","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T22:53:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/how-to-be-a-good-explorer-in-the-lifelong-expedition-to-yourself-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T18:53:51","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T22:53:51","slug":"how-to-be-a-good-explorer-in-the-lifelong-expedition-to-yourself-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/how-to-be-a-good-explorer-in-the-lifelong-expedition-to-yourself-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Be a Good Explorer in the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination \u2014 success<\/a>, superhuman strength<\/a>, the love of another<\/a>. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn\u2019t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience<\/a> that demands; its payoff is discovery \u2014 of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation. <\/p>\n

On the pages of his posthumously published masterpiece The Book of Disquiet<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa<\/strong> (June 13, 1888\u2013November 30, 1935) considers the complex question of discovering yourself. He writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don\u2019t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn\u2019t mine: it\u2019s me.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Everything is in us \u2014 all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It may be that we don\u2019t know how to look because we are looking as tourists \u2014 passing visitors to the foreign parts of ourselves \u2014 rather than explorers. The spirit of exploration is something else altogether, requiring a total receptivity to experience \u2014 the mind uncaged from expectation and convention, the animal sensorium fully open to every channel of aliveness, the soul ready for the revelation of discovery. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pessoa offers a brief, blazing set of instructions to himself for how to attain such revelatory receptivity: <\/p>\n

\n

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Couple with Pessoa on unselfing into who you really are<\/a>, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir\u2019s instructions to herself for how to have a life worth living<\/a> and Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination \u2014 success, superhuman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}