A quite sentimental take... on a quite sentimental pursuit, where the one is enshrined in the hearts of the many.
Civilizations have long formed collective fabrics that brought them together to prosper, instill peace, and carve out their space in the larger human story. These narratives tell of a group's action and cooperation and its returns. While I don't minimize their impact — nor the gifts that in some occasions keep giving to this day — I propose the individual pursuit of the heart.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked... I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Every individualist is a finite fertile where thought and spirit and heart are pursued. Budding in their upbringing and branching out throughout their entire life. And out come figs from our finite fertile — like Sylvia Plath's Fig Tree, all figs the same, but in each fig there is a wonderful future that beckons and winks. Plath saw this as paralysis: you cannot eat every fig, and in hesitating, they all fall. I see it differently.
People naturally deviate from one another. Every person tells of a different life: a natural deviation that both realizes the individual and gives to the collective, gives them an experiment to watch and learn from, gives them literature and inventions, gives them a rich person, a forest from the finite fertile. The tragedy Plath describes is real — but it is not inevitable. The individualist does not have to sit in the tree alone.
This piece is called the individualist pursuit of the heart because individualists should not be alone. They need each other and other people in their individualist pursuit. In our pursuit of the heart we should help each other, challenge each other, and most importantly accept and embolden one another — rejecting conformity. Making the social benign: a unique fashion of a collective cut in many different fabrics, some of them similar, some different, and some miraculously unique.
Individualist Pursuit of the Heart is a piece that aims to anchor individualism within the larger sphere of civilization and social life.