willpower

We had a guy quit this week. It's more significant, perhaps, than in other job situations, since in our camp we ask everyone to sign a written promise that they won't. This often gets people through the toughness of the learning stage. His reason (read: excuse) was that he just didn't have the willpower. Obviously.

This gets me thinking about how we make the choices we make. This fella obviously in some way wanted to do well at planting, and was also quite capable of it (one day he'd put in over 2,000 trees). What is it that enables someone to couple desire with action so as to enact change in a person's situation and environment?

You see, desire and action are deeply linked entities which must interact in some mystical way througout the entire process of change. Desire, for instance, is static when isolated. Desiring to eat less junk food won't necessarily keep the twinkies out of the mouth, since desires are always in flux, and are always at odds with other desires.
Action, likewise, is useless without some sort of desire to inform it. Deeply insane people do a lot of different things, but not much positive change happens.

To fuse the two you need a sort of motive force that binds desire and action. What is this mystery force? Bing, bing, bing - you got it! - willpower. OK, so what is it? Is it just something from a self-help book? Nope, it's a person's inbuilt capacity to choose, and the strength of a person's willpower is the crucial, deciding factor in determining their capacity to enact change.

This brings up eighteen pounds of questions, such as: Where does it come from? Why do some people have truckloads of it, while others have to search their souls for a thimbleful just to get up and go to the bathroom? Why can it be there one moment and gone the next? Is it some divinely-oppointed gift, welling up as a manifestation of the Good? Surely not, because willpower does a lot of nasty things. Is it environmentally produced, requiring domineering parents and a virulent inferiority complex? Maybe. But maybe it's biochemical, or an aspect of personality, character, or soul. That could also be true, and I pick character as the most important part of all this.

Why? Because character is itself a malleable force, subject to change at the far end of the fusing of desire and action. This sits well with my "all is connected" way of seeing things. For better or worse, a person's character shapes their actions, and is itself shaped by them. I like that.

So, if willpower is an attribute of character apart from desire and action, and both changes and is changed by each decision we make, then how do we control our willpower so as to enact the most positive change? The answer is simple, I think, but brilliantly unpopular. Are you ready? Here goes: discipline. Doesn't really answer the question, does it? At least not in any easy, comfortable way. Get used to it. As the man says: "life is pain, highness. anyone who tells you differently is selling something."

addendum: This stuff is only possible in your temporal-based activities. Eternity is a bigger stage, and to play upon it perfectly you need a spirit of continual, abject humility - which you cannot acheive on your own. All your efforts will fail. You will serve only yourself. Give up. Let go.