You know, it’s been a minute since I posted on here, and the reason is that, as my former father in law used to say, I had to see a man about a horse.
And this horse seeing involved some building in my own life. Some physical work, to make something more beautiful.
And it hit me that one of the biggest obstacles all of us face to building beautiful things in our lives is the consciousness that they will all be undone. Everything will pass and fall. If the bastards conquer this planet, whatever they build will pass and fall eventually, as I explored at length some years ago in a post titled “Perfection”.
I think in my own case much of my own procrastination stems from a denial of Time. If I just put something off, then I can pretend time isn’t real, that I have all the time in this life I need.
I’ve probably quoted it before, but I like John Mellancamp’s line “growing up means growing old and then dyin’; and dyin’ to me don’t sound like all that much fun.”
So we–and I think there are a lot of people like me–put off until tomorrow what we could to today, for the simple reason that we want to feel like we are going to live forever. It is a comforting delusion, that is not just pure laziness.
We are born and meant to work. We are born to do a reasonable days work every day, then sleep soundly. This is our birthright, our heritage. And most true, lasting pleasure come from work.
And this is where I think having a belief in an after-life–or continuation of life–helps a lot. It is scientifically defensible, and arguably the default position from a truly empirical perspective.
And from this perspective, the task is not to build and expect anything to last. What you are ACTUALLY building is the ability to build. We have to learn how to learn, and learn how to build. It is a habit that is worth cultivating, that you keep by it become part of who you ARE.
So what we term laziness really needs to be examined more carefully. Yes, being an obsessive workaholic is not healthy, because it amounts to a continual deflection from unwanted inner emotions that kind of combine and project out as anxiety, but being lazy is just as bad, and arguably worse. At least the workaholic can point to this, that and the other thing at the end of life.
So what is laziness? It is what I said: a rejection of death. What else? I am typing out “loud” now. Smoking a cigar.
I think in our society, refusing to work is also a form of self assertion. Work is made to feel shameful because we are so often treated like peons, like slaves, like undignified little animals, doing stupid things that are boring, over and over, while someone else gets to play with the profits. In our world, that is a big part of it.
And I think, too, that we DO need silence, down town, and play time. Play, in its own way, is serious work. It requires energy, focus, attention. Story telling, dancing, singing, games: these are forms of what might be termed Cultural work, or “social” work, even if that term is already taken.
What we are not meant to do is listlessly and mindlessly consume. What we are not meant to do is watch endless hours of TV that does not occupy our minds, but rather satisfies an animalian appetite for violence and spectacle, but poorly. Hunting, as one example, is a physically healthy, and perhaps emotionally healthy, for most, activity. You are out there in the wild, on the plain or the woods, sensing, looking, prowling, aiming.
But compare a comedy on TV with a game of Charades played with actual people. The emotional need underlying both is the same, but in the first you learn nothing because you don’t participate; and in the second you do. It is like a tanning bed compared to the full sun.
And of course trauma changes our relationship to Time too. Dissociation is timeless, and going back into time means recalling all those feelings that hurt so much.
As I have said before, this blog really comes from an emotionally unhealthy place for me. I am driven. It is fortunate that I happen to be unusually intelligent and observant (I think), but I would find something like this, where I said stupid things if that was all I could do, if I were not able to do this.
I had a brief moment of relative freedom from this burden the day before yesterday. I did a neurofeedback session, and came out feeling like a injured animal. I went to my bed and laid there, hurt, like a dog licking its wounds. But the pressure of continual thought was gone. I felt no need to say anything to anyone. In its own way, it was great.
And as I said in the previous post, you can’t make the future brighter by making the present more gray. My mission is to learn fearlessness, which is to say emotional present-ness in all circumstances, which is to say, only feeling fear when fear is an appropriate reaction.
And actually I will append a note I made myself the other day: it is acceptable to let a person or accident rob you of life, but never an idea.
And what I mean should be clear enough. We all die. But we should not spend every moment of every day trying not to die by thinking of all the ways something could go south. I don’t need to be gaming which exit I will use if a shooter comes through that door when I am eating out. I don’t need to be rehearsing drawing my gun for hours every day.
What will get you will most likely come out of left field. If you work daily on developing situational awareness, which is BETTER if you omit the fear, because more complete, less blinkered by the tunnel effect, and COMPETENCE–which is the ability to plan out your action, then execute it (OODA), then change it if need be–then that is your best chance at surviving whatever. You can do dry runs in literally everything you do, from taking out the garbage to filling out your taxes.
It is not only the samurai whose destiny is death.
And I will comment, too, that I think many soldiers and police and firefighters consciously choose dangerous professions as means of concretizing ambient fear which would otherwise have no obvious source. If I start out afraid, it becomes a positive in a place where true physical danger is often present.
I myself wanted to be a cop, and I think for that reason. Now, obviously this doesn’t apply to all of them. I have met some truly brave–relaxed and fearless–soldiers, who operated from what appeared to me truly idealistic motives. And I will actually add that the BEST soldiers I’ve met were very relaxed. Most of the SEAL’s and others of that sort I’ve known were like that. To do that job well you don’t practice fear: you practice relaxed competence.
And I will add that in that world, the ones I admire most are the CCT’s. Their job is uniquely stressful, so to adapt they have to become uniquely calm and fearless. They have to deal with the same firefights everyone else does. They incur the same risks infiltrating wherever. And typically they do so with people from another service, and usually while carrying more weight.
And their JOB is to do math, to maintain 3d situational awareness, and to THINK, to think HARD, all while under severe stress. You cannot do that job without just not giving a shit at some level.
In that world, John Chapman, and Jim Hoteling–who spent something like 40 hours climbing a mountain in the dark with a 130 pound pack, then immediately provided many hours of accurate CAS, in my recollection–are two of my heroes.
The studs are not the ones teaching classes on survival and urban combat. The studs are the ones who do that work, then come home and are fully emotionally present to their families.