time

For the first time in a long while I'm sitting down at a computer without the constraint of a library limit pressing on the anterior region of my cerebellum, and perhaps somewhere in the cockles of my heart (or maybe even the sub-cockles).

It doesn't make much difference. Computers are inherently time-based demons, and it's a hyper-driven sort of temporality. Keeping up is not only impossible, it's insane. In an ideal world, I would sit on the porch of my cabin by a lake sipping hot tea in the morning. I would commune with the source of it all and meditate, allowing myself to be still and know that there is a God, and that I am not it. Then, eventually, a birdcall would echo across the still surface of the water, bounding through the mist to tickle my tympanum and remind me, somehow, of something else. I would pull out a few sheets of hand-pressed paper, hand-made by my friend Kurt Armstrong, and I would write down a thought or two. When my tea and thoughts were done, I'd hand the sheets to my wife (who'd be creaking very slowly in the hammock next to me), and she would walk inside to our satellite-linked, incredibly-fast laptop discreetly hidden in an alcove by the toilet, and she'd copy it out for me. Because that's what loving wives do - the dirty work.

Fantasies are fun and useful, but in the long run they become the crutch of fools. Love it or not, I'm in this sick sad mad-paced world, so I will chose to accept it and love it and live in it to the best of my ability. However, if anybody has a cabin to loan me, I'm game.

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.

philoposee

Yesterday in the truck on the way home from work we got into a "discussion" about free will vs. determinism, which, in a group of more than two people, is pretty much guaranteed to provoke some sort of emotional response in someone. For some reason, the world seems to be divided into two groups on this one. First, we have the people who think everything they do is determined by forces outside their control (and for some reason they're OK with this, or at least haven't killed themselves), and on the other hand there are those who think they've got the power to control everything and to determine everything as they go along.

Most people don't do this consciously, so as soon as you suggest that their particular view may be composed of three parts hogwash and seven parts lung butter, their subconscious goes into hyperdrive, saying something like this: "Whooah there, Nelly! This pooey-head's trying to shift my paradigm. That's disturbing and freaky and what in the name of pete's navel will I do without my paradigm? I gotta stop this creep! I gotta attack! I gotta defend!" And so on and so forth.

Instead of trying to trace the convoluted paths of my thought on this in my two remaining minutes of internet time, I'll just say that I'm starting to learn that conflict and antagonism are necessary for growth. It's always difficult and usually painful, but I've just got to struggle through with an honest and humble approach to ideas that don't fit my staunchly internalized worldview and paradigm. Is that a form of dialectical materialism? Am I a marxist? I just want to love more - why does love have to hurt?