Meeting Thanatos: Meet Xerxes.

My name is Xerxes and I'm not happy.
I'm not unhappy because my name is Xerxes, that's something I've come to accept over the years, despite having to spell it each and every time I say it to people in stores or banks or whatever. Usually they want to know what it means and the story behind how I got it too. I patiently explain for the hundred-thousandth time that it means 'Ruler of heroes'. Most people kind of grin and say something like, 'Cool! So you're like, Superman's king yeah?' or something equally witty in their eyes but which I will have heard countless times before.

I smile.

I smile a pleasant smile which doesn't quite reach my eyes and I think of how, in this time, people think of heroes in terms of comic book superheroes, many of whom take their origins and narrative roots from Greek characters. It's a cycle that most aren't aware of. The Greeks even came up with the three act structure and were so enamoured with it that they considered the number three to be the first 'true' number, because it had a beginning, middle and an end.
Then they will ask me if my parents were hippies or something. I will patiently tell them my parents were both teachers, one of History and one of English literature. They both had a love of Greek mythology, and wanted a strong name for their first born son, hence the name Xerxes.
Every year we would visit a different Greek island or the mainland for our holidays. We would spend days at the Acropolis or the Parthenon or standing at the spot where the Colossus of Rhodes once stood. I would have the time of my life looking at the crumbling architecture, standing defiant against the ravages of Chronos, God of time. Immune enough to Apollo and Artemis, the sun and the moon, Hemera and Nyx, day and night, to never have to worry about meeting Thanatos, the God of death. Thanatos didn't appear much in the Greek myths, but he was always there in the background, waiting for those who left this life.
See, that's part of why I'm unhappy. I fucking hate Thanatos. I always have. Since I was small I've been tormented by my own mortality. The very idea that I can go through this life and accrue knowledge and skills in the sorts of amounts that would cripple a supercomputer and then one day I will be just gone fills me with such a furious raging that I feel like my very viscera will boil away to ash, leaving just a hollow shell. Everything I've ever learned, everything I've ever achieved will ultimately be for nothing. Even if I pass on my DNA by having children, they will learn different things, have different experiences.
For a while I was a nihilist. It seemed like the obvious choice. Everything you do in this life is ultimately futile anyway so why bother? This coincided with a time in my life that was already troubled by changing hormones, new desires, the pressures of groups and the discovery of drugs and alcohol. I drowned myself in a chemical wasteland, wandering aimlessly for what was there to aim for? No one wanted to help me and I wanted no one's help. I wasn't asking to be saved.
Eventually through a series of small epiphanies I became aware that this was not the way to be. If this life was all I was ever going to get, then I'd better start thinking about what I was going to do with my time. I became more spiritual, but in a secular sense. I read about many different philosophies and a few religions. I dabbled with Zen and meditation, Yoga, various martial arts and met Yogi's, Gurus, Swami's and every kind of self-confessed prophet and philosopher you could imagine. Most of them were full of shit, but at the time they had my rapt attention. These were my hippie years. I even lived in Glastonbury, under the shadow of the Tor - at least on crisp autumnal evenings, when the sun sank in the sky and the shadows stretched further than the things that cast them.
Then, I suppose relatively recently, I rejected that mindset too. I decided philosophy was a personal thing, like religion, or at least, how religious feelings should be. I read everything I could on western philosophy and cobbled together my own personal take on the world. I had learned to only use whatever works from my days studying freestyle martial arts. Methods like Jeet Kune Do or MMA would use kicks, strikes, grapples, punches and whatever else from many different sources but only because they worked. I remember my MMA instructor asking me to throw a kick at him. I'd previously studied Karate and more recently Tae Kwon Do, so I aimed a roundhouse kick at his head. He parried it easily and explained to me that in their system they never kick above the waist because once you lift your leg over that point, you not only put yourself at risk of being overbalanced, but also lose most of the power in the kick.
I became a seamster, using scraps of learning and knowledge to stitch together a patchwork quilt of thought, a framework by which to live my life, using whatever worked for me. I decided it was about living a good life, regardless of outside influence or circumstance, so I made up my own ten commandments:

1. Do not kill any creature.

I firmly believe that everything on this planet has as much right to be here as I do and I have absolutely no right to end the life of any creature that walks, swims, flies or whatever. I have no wish to send anything to meet Thanatos.

2. Respect everything.

Not the easiest one to follow, especially when it comes to other people, but I think it's important to try. Some of the supposed philosophers etc were difficult to respect because they were so full of shit. I learned that it's important to respect the fact that they're full of shit however. This commandment also refers to the nature of things in and of themselves.

3. Before action, thought.

Kind of another way of saying 'look before you leap', but basically think about things before I do them.

4. Give freely to others, but take nothing that isn't freely given.

Give freely doesn't just mean things - give your time, your attention, favours - whatever. The last part is basically 'don't steal'.

5. Know thyself.

Once you know yourself, you come from a stronger foundation with which to build relationships with others. It's a lifelong process.

6. Take responsibility for your emotions and actions, but yours only.

This is one of the most important things I've ever learned and I learned it during a particularly tempestuous relationship. Regardless of the nature of that relationship, I still thank the woman who taught me this. Basically, you have to learn to be accountable for what you say, what you do and how you act. People usually take responsibility for their actions, but rarely their emotions. I used to say things like, "You made me feel that way!" which is not true. If you feel a certain way, you have allowed yourself to feel that way, whether you realise it or not. Also don't take responsibility for other people's moods etc - if you do, you spend your life wracked with guilt about things that aren't your fault and end up being manipulated by anyone that can spot that trait in you. The bottom line is that if you are responsible, you will be reasonable and rational (most of the time,) and if someone gets upset or takes offence to something, (and you didn't intend for that to happen,) then it's their problem, not yours.

7. Honor those that matter to you.

I've got a commandment that states 'Respect Everything', which covers people you don't know, or even don't like. This one was about honoring the people you care most about. In my head that meant telling them you love them, or showing affection in whatever way, be it family or friends. I'm not a big family person to be honest - there are members of my family that I love dearly, but others I'm not so wild about and I don't see the point pretending otherwise just because random chance meant I was born with some of the same genetic material. I get to choose my friends, so for the most part they mean more to me.

8. Seek knowledge but work for wisdom.

Peter Kay said it best when he said, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad."

9. Do nothing for someone else that you would not do for yourself and vice versa.

Basically if someone asks you to do something you wouldn't normally do or are uncomfortable with - don't do it, no matter who is asking or why. Also don't ask anyone else to do something you wouldn't be prepared to do yourself. I believe you can think anything you like, but you are what you do.

10. Try to lead a good life.

Of course a 'good life' is open to interpretation as it is not only completely subjective but also a pretty vague term, but Trotsky's famous quote is apt here;
"There are no absolute rules of conduct in either war or peace. Everything depends on circumstances."
Morality is a personal thing and has to be recognised as fluid - there are circumstances in which you would act completely differently to what you may think of as morally 'normal', owing to the nature of the circumstances. This does not suddenly make you a bad person or a different person, just the same person in a different set of circumstances

I sound like a pretty good guy right? Respectful, helpful, freely giving of my time, generous in other ways... Well I'm under no illusions about who or what I am - see commandment 5. I've done some things in my time that have broken one or two of my commandments, particularly numbers two and three, although some of the others have come in for some severe bending of interpretation over the years. Besides, no one thinks they're a 'bad person' do they? Cognitive dissonance just won't allow it. Even people that do lots of bad things, (especially those sorts of people in fact,) usually justify it to themselves in the name of some greater good, whether it be religion, or 'the people' or family... whatever. They come up with some excuse as to why they have done the things they have done and usually include a phrase along the lines of:
"I did what I had to."
We all do what we have to.
So now we'll get to the real reason I'm not happy, but it'll require a little bit of background. In my line of work, there's a certain level of give and take. The guy at the bottom takes shit from the guy one rung above, who in turn takes it from the guy above him and so on until you reach whoever is sat on the top of the dungheap who takes no shit at all, instead spending their time throwing shit down the pile, giving it to everyone else. If you understand this very simple premise - and it's amazing how many people don't seem to be able to get their heads around it, you can learn how to climb the pile and if you're really lucky, you might even be able to pick which shit you take. Now that's power.
I'm a pretty smart sort of a guy. I know who to deal with and who not to deal with. I've learned what shit I have to take and how to avoid situations which end in me taking shit I don't want to. It's been an arduous learning process, filled with pitfalls and mistakes along the way, but that's how we learn right? I figure as long as you learn from your mistakes, you're making progress. You can spot the ones not to deal with, as they're the ones that repeat mistakes more than twice. Once is a mistake. Twice is either stupid or unlucky, depending on the circumstances. Three times? Well you just aren't paying attention are you?
So, I've ended up in a position where, through a set of unusual circumstances, I broke commandment three, which lead to the breaking of commandments two, then four. This lead to the contravention of commandment 6, and the events therein broke seven. The upshot is that now I will have to break nine, and ultimately one, which will pretty much negate ten. If you need to go back and read the list again, please feel free to do so. Hopefully you'll get what I'm talking about and gain an understanding of the level of shit I'm in.