Just be who you wanted to be when you grew up. It isn't that hard. Okay, it's horrendously hard, but on balance it is not harder than making your whole life about why you aren't the person you wanted to be and why you don't have the life you wanted to have. That, and believe me I speak from experience, is exhausting. Everyone I know who has had their soul sucked out had it happen as a result of a moment when they knew the right thing to do, and did the opposite. This is the same thing. They'll make a pile of excuses and every last one of them will be some desperate attempt not to do what they know in their bones needs to be done.
Anias Nin said that, in the end, the risk to remain tight in a bud is worse than the risk involved in just going ahead, opening up, and blooming. I see it every day in my garden. Yet, unlike us, the plants almost always, always, always choose to open the bud, to turn the blossom to seed, to be cracked open by cold, water, warmth.
Athenae's post reminds me a bit of this and this.
Everyone I know who has had their soul sucked out had it happen as a result of a moment when they knew the right thing to do, and did the opposite.Jung famously said that:
existential suffering is the result of our trying to avoid pain, by denial and repression. None of us wants pain. We naturally shun it. But doing so is like the spleen refusing to do its job. It leads to big trouble, dis-ease, and real problems. In the realm of the psyche, these are called “neuroses.” Jung identified the long-term habit of repression (our “stuffing” unpleasant feelings, facts, etc. within) as the cause of neuroses.
Because we all do this, we are all “neurotic” to one degree or another. This is “meaningless” suffering because it makes no sense, has no significance, and gives us no benefit. This form of suffering, in other words, is not a gift.
The form of suffering that is meaningful comes when we stop repressing and take up our moral task as humans to deal consciously with our pain. In this process, we take up the pain that is endemic to living and work with it, in the knowledge that pain has a purpose. It is a warning, with an intrinsic message. We need to listen to our inner voices to learn this message.
Meaningless pain is knowing what to do and doing the opposite; refusing to take up our moral task as humans to deal consciously with our pain. Being human is taking up the moral task (and, let's be honest, sometimes, it was a good thing for us, as children, to "stuff" it to be dealt with later, but, well, later is now) of dealing with "the pain," of dealing with what we know in our bones needs to be done.
I think what's stopping me is simple sloth. Habit. The ability to be always "too busy" at "just this moment." What's stopping you?
What's pushing me is my desire to be fully alive, my awareness of my Better Self, the notion that this was really all supposed to be fulfilling, and glorious, and fun. What's pushing you?
4 comments:
Very thought-provoking post. I presume that you've read Frankl's work on the relationship between meaning and suffering (particularly Man's Search for Meaning).
And, by the way, you have no need to envy Athenae--or anyone. Most of your writing is pure poetry.
wadr, I'm starting to think my place on Earth has something to do with giving voice to the following, for however long it takes:
FOR AS LONG AS it is true (and by that I mean we have no more need to speak in hypotheticals because, by golly, we know it to be fact), that there are places where people are searching for people on lists because why, well we aren't really sure, but there are thousands of them and they have leadership qualities but they live among the riff raff and that can't possibly be good and so and so and so, CAN WE please stop bottom lining so-called causal narratives in a manner that doesn't account for reality? Or different possible realities?
The very definition of a Fifth-Street suckout moment is to have played all your cards exactly right given the parameters and having the lesser probable event occur nonetheless. Then what? Sweet Maude, anything but reductionism.
Humbled by the Genome's Mysteries:
Stephen Jay Gould
"The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems -- predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example.
[....]
"The failure of reductionism doesn't mark the failure of science, but only the replacement of an ultimately unworkable set of assumptions by more appropriate styles of explanation that study complexity at its own level and respect the influences of unique histories."
Occam would love a more workable set of assumptions (fewer new bizarro ones, plz.) and all of us could use more appropriate styles of explanation.
That's the push for the next evolution. Just a guess.
I am actually doing it now, and am not stopping myself. What has stopped me before was an unwillingness to deal with, and so live within, pain. This is not unusual or unhealthy, I think.
I don't know if anything is pushing me right now. It is simply the right time and I am in a place where I can handle it.
I am lucky enough that I have a personality (ISFP) that means if I know in my bones it must be done I have no choice but to do it, even if I'm scared. No choice. This automatically cuts through a lot of the bullshit of things.
The form of suffering that is meaningful comes when we stop repressing and take up our moral task as humans to deal consciously with our pain.
No, actually. It's nice to be able to deal with it consciously, and it makes for growth and becoming whole, sure, but there is no moral obligation to do so, and people who don't, or can't, are not therefore 'immoral', which is the implication in this framing. I will not have anything to do with that, so no.
The older I get the more I know that compassion and kindness are really all that count. And that starts with compassion and kindness for the self. Which means, for me, not pushing if I am afraid. That is my moral obligation to myself.
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