Technical Difficulties

So, apparently Blogger refuses to let me get text in a post to be the way I ask it to in editing. So, for whatever reason, until it will just magically work, some posts might look a bit wonky font-size-wise, perhaps otherwise, too.

I've had difficulties like this with Blogger in past posts and the only thing I could do was keep editing and wish it would 'stick' eventually. It's preposterous. So we'll see.

Edit: So far I got it to work (by selecting each paragraph separately and changing it! What on earth, Blogger?). I get really towards not wanting to write blogs when the platform creates issues like this- I had issues with Wordpress before, and gave up on it, and now Blogger.

Consider this post a warning that this will probably happen again and posts could, for no reason I know of, look out of the usual format.

Life is a Dance

Ordinary life is a dance, work itself is a dance… it is a dance with time, a dance with need, staring poverty in the face and choosing to fight that possible future, to create instead a bountiful (or bountiful enough) future.

It is no life to live not realising that catastrophe is possible, that the safety and comfort of the present could suddenly turn to naught. It is no life to act as if pain and death do not exist. It is an empty life, a fearful life, because we deep down do know we could not get what we want… we can’t face that fact. We can’t face that reality is full of futures we might not wish to have. We want to hide with our heads in the sand, face away from the window of our room, just so as to avoid the ‘dark futures.’ We cannot look in the face of the pain and loss others we know face, or the pain and loss evident in history and in other places far away.

And when we fear pain and loss, we are the worst comforters to those who go through it. And then when we go through it, we know that since we didn’t wish to go deep into another person’s darkness and grief, nobody else will do that for us! It is what in our minds we think is normal- avoiding the pain and facing hard reality is normal to us, so we cannot grieve. We think we have to pull ourselves up from it, and that inevitably includes ignoring it, I have found.

It does not mean you can’t tilt your hat at its existence, say words that acknowledge that pain was there, but you can’t face it. You can say, detaching your heart from your words, that you’re sad that someone died. But if you were to look at it, you’d see that it opens up a whole train of thought that alludes to the fragility of life, which we hate to face. We wish to extend life, and because we are so hell bent on that, we cannot stare life in the face- part of knowing about life is knowing about death. You don’t know life unless you know that it could-have-not-been.

You can’t fully live if you do not face that life is that dance at the edge of death. Life could so easily be put out, like a bit of breeze puts a candle out all of a sudden. Life is as fragile as a candle’s light, as fragile as a crystal glass or a bit of expensive china. But also it is akin as precious, comparatively, as those things- we wish our lives, and the lives of those around us, to continue just as fervently, or rather much more fervently, as we wish for our precious crystal and china to last. We take care with our lives as we take care with a fragile object.

We should not be afraid to see that. It does no good to turn away from that fact, that any random accident could happen. It is all in the air around us to fear this fact, so we are addicted to safety, to finding all ways we can to prevent calamity, to prevent that little wind from coming and puffing out our candle of life, puffing out our fragile civilisation.

What if we stopped fearing this? How could it be better for us?

Joyful Self-Discipline

I have a tendency to turn my self-discipline into a sort of hard pushiness. I too easily want to tell myself I am doing things 'wrong.'

I effectively (emotionally) forget that self-discipline is a glorious, wonderful, freeing thing. If you can, in fact, make yourself do what you know you ought to do, what you know you long-term would like yourself to do, it is incredibly nice. Or so I found. I would call it a kind of Narnian self-discipline. A joyous discipline that knows that every step you take now will lead to great fruit later- a hopeful outlook.

I am very numb these days, so it's hard to remember this. I am very hopeless, downtrod. I used to take great, great pleasure in seeing myself improve- seeing myself become wiser and stronger, and also more happy. To be capable, to be able, to be able to feel all the ups and downs without the downs SMITING you, is wonderful. To know there is a future, and that it is not all in your control- that you can let go that tight monster-grip on the future.

This, of course, only works for me because I believe that God ultimately has the reins, even though I don't feel as if I believe that right now. One goes emotionally through ups and downs. So I can lean into this, and lean into the beauty of self-discipline- it is a part of sanctification, and sanctification is the most beautiful thing that can happen to me!

The hard work of self-discipline goes through also the path of being able to accept our weakness, which is probably what is hardest for me to accept (perhaps would be for anyone?). We all have different forms of weakness. For me at least right now, I am seeing that I want to be able to do whatever I 'should be able to,' which is also what I want, because I love to be capable long-term. But I have lost sight of the love and gone solely at this as 'I NEED TO BE CAPABLE,' thus losing sight of what would motivate me to be capable in the first place! I thrive on motivation, I thrive on intense enjoyment of reality, and without it, when I am numb, I am hopeless and desperate.

This is morphing into talking about the love aspect: my goal needs to be the love of 'what is right,' because that actually helps me, rather than the 'need to be capable,' which is rather utilitarian and devoid of meaning. I can ignite it with meaning, and then immediately I go back to an infatuation with the beauty of Humans As Creative Beings.

So I just get back to where I started years ago, and that's good. But- to feel it! How to feel it?

Dietrich von Hildebrand on Beauty in Light of Redemption

My dear Madame W. shared this chapter, 'Beauty in the Light of the Redemption,' which relates to previous posts about beauty, completion, perfection.

It was a wonderful post which I will still be mulling over- it is hard for me to accept that this Highest Beauty can be a real, true thing that I am allowed not to shun. I have been damning it in my mind for a long time because I have most strongly desired it. I felt as a child that beauty could not be God, but I also knew that I was 'overthinking things.' It is an odd situation. I told myself that what I wanted could not be what was.

I was playing a kind of self-hatred game with myself my whole life, trying to bereave myself of everything that made life worth living, as if that makes one righteous.

I know that if I opened myself to believing Beauty to really be Good, I would have to deal with my tendency to make Beauty and other un-primary things primary. I probably am doing it subconsciously even as I am 'damning' it within myself.

If I am indeed damning it within myself, and it is truly 'of God,' then that would mean I am sinning in that respect. I'm not afraid of this: it is actually a relief to realise it might be wrong, but I am 'damning' Beauty because I imagine it to be for some higher good that I am damning it, but I think it is going about things the wrong way. The way to put Beauty in its actual place is to seek first the Kingdom of God. Then 'all these things' will be added unto me. God created this world and all that He intended is meant to be. He did not create an accident that is to be 'put away' when some process is done with. The world is part of the end. The goal, the telos. We are creaturely things, the world our setting.

I immediately think: then I must fight with myself, make myself see Beauty as good! But again, this is looking at this wrong. I look at everything as a fight, as me having to punch myself around till things fall into their proper place. I need to stop it. Stop looking at myself as something to be pushed around and forced into its place. To be sorted, to be dealt with. It is very, very hard to shed this... and at this very moment, I am in a bit of a rut and can't for the life of me see how I would begin to relax into not damning Beauty.

Procrastination and Emotions

Apparently some people are thinking that procrastination is not about time management, or life management and planning in general, but is instead a matter of emotions. Here is an article for your pleasure.

It makes sense to me, as I have long struggled with certain elements of procrastination (who doesn't, these days?). I tend to think we are in an age of procrastination; everyone doing it in their own way. It is not good. The prevalence of all sorts of excuses not to do obvious everyday duties, excuses not to do things that will toughen you up, worries me.

And it is about emotions. We have to learn to buoy ourselves up so that we can lionheartedly deal with the things life is made of. We should not shirk them, or fear them. We should not imagine we need something to assuage our unmotivated gloom. A lot of the people I know seem to live to some degree on the Scale of Acedia. These days many of us suffer from not having any reason to live, and we also don't seem to realise that we will at some point suffer from feeling there is no point to live. If we knew that we would feel that way, and that it ultimately means nothing to whether life has a point at all or not, then we might be a lot better off.

But without that knowledge, we are not armed against the impending dark raincloud of pointlessness. We are incredibly susceptible to stories of doomful happenings and despair-inducing realities. This inadvertently heads into the territory of 'what to do about suffering,' but that's not the point here.

Ultimately, though, we'll have to deal with life often seeming a hopeless, pointless thing. The question we will have to answer is whether it even matters. If you constantly live worrying about whether life is hopeless or not, you'll probably never get to the actual meat of living, and therefore you'll be cut off from ever feeling like there's a point to living.

Sadly, this is exactly one of those things in life where, if you want something, you're going to have to act as if you had it so that you can get it. To feel motivated, you're going to have to just do it anyway and then when you produce results, and feel all exhausted (but happily so) at the end of the day, you'll be all happy to sit on your front porch with your feet on chair puffing your evening smokerings (or better, if you're actually a wizard, Harry). You'll possibly sometimes feel rip-roaring for the next day to come so that you can become even more happily productive.

To overcome procrastination, you have to act as if you didn't procrastinate. It is the only way.

Weakness and Strength

Over the years starting in childhood, I tried to defy my own desire for things that lighten my mood. I tried to become strong by not needing anything to lighten me up, to lighten the gloom and greyness of life. But now I'm just really crusty and irritated and want to die.

I'm not so sure it worked so well.

I went too far. There is a joyous spot in between extremes, I think. A joyous spot of realising you're weak and sinful and need help and not imagining you can do it all yourself. Not imagining that strength means being solitary, that needing a helping hand is weakness.

Now I cannot accept help or crutches (except the many crutches I naturally cling to after all that I've forced myself to deny). I cling to things to support me in the darkness, alone, unwilling to admit what I have done to myself, unwilling to admit that even as I try to be strong, I am weak under the surface, clinging to addictions that one can always find and hide in the secret darkness.

I am telling myself, so that I can keep myself out of the darkest depths, that I have managed it! I am strong, I have defied death! But I am losing my mind and falling into complete insanity. I can't think clearly, I can't see beautiful things, I won't let myself see beautiful things because if I dared see them, I might start needing them to lighten my mood! I can't possibly let myself even have the possibility of lightening my mood.

Then I would be at risk of falling off the skyscraper of hope and joy and crash back into the abyss of horrifying nothingness! If I dared let myself think there really is anything there in this world, that this world even exists, that Beauty exists, I would be terribly at risk of experiencing a crushing blow to the head that I could never recover from.

Right?

Of course, this is no way to live. I have to choose: do I live, or do I die? And living means opening myself to beauty, and opening myself to the scary possibilities of being crushed, of being teased, of being found to be ignorant and stupid, of not getting to do what I would like to do, all those things.

I have to let it all come flooding upon me, gripping me with an iron grip. At first it will be hard, having lived so long in a state of Stoic Doldrums. The real difficulty comes from what I most fear, which I won't talk about right now. It is not fear of feeling things, but fear of things far beyond that. If only it were just feelings- I rather like that idea.

Thinking Oneself to Death

I have been trying to transcend perspective, to question myself to such an extent that nothing I think goes unthought-about. Always checking what I assume, always questioning myself. But it is exhausting. You can’t keep questioning your own perception. You have to accept that you merely perceive and build that up over time- experience, simple experience. It wastes ever so much time to worry about ‘why you thought that’ and whether it came up because of some previous bias (in the hopes that in the future you can never be accused of 'bias').

Everything probably does arise due to ‘bias’, but all bias is, when it really comes down to it, is that we are not God, not able to see everything happening everywhere, and therefore don’t know what we’re really looking at. If one insists on being aware of the bias, one can only settle back and be patient to wait till new information comes in to illuminate previous information and give it its context.

But it is all a waste of one’s mind to worry about it at all. And the person who worries about it is in danger of being cocky that he knows better than everyone else because he at least is willing to question himself (even to the point of questioning his own existence!). I have just the exact same kind of hubris that many recent philosophers may have had (here I question my assumption that they had it).

I have been exhausting myself. When I read a book, I don’t merely listen to it from my perspective; I think about what others would think of what I am thinking of it, and I think about where the author came from in saying what he’s saying, and think about what people who disagree with him might say to him and I get mentally to the exhausting point of thinking, what’s the point of thinking at all if all thinking is the result of … previous thinking? Oh dear. Oh dear, dear, dear.

Everything we think is contingent. I’m having to argue with myself that that is fine. But I should stop arguing with myself and be a simple peasant instead; back off out of this silly elitist tomfoolery of thinking I could possibly ever be truly objective. Who can? Nobody. No amount of self-questioning will work. And if you ever dare try to know all the knowledge in the world, your brain might just explode as in the Indiana Jones movie, The Crystal Skull, or you will at least go mildly insane (like I have) and wish you were dead.

I must meditate on what it would be to be a simple peasant. I have to stop this intellectualist nonsense. It is far better to go outside and wonder silly things about why that thing is there; did a squirrel pop by? Then move on to ‘I feel like a cup of tea!’ and ‘I feel like reading that essay by Lewis again where he talks about questioning ourselves to death…’ (Lewis probably wrote many such essays. Other people likely have, too. We’re all stuck inside a dystopian nightmare of self-important thinking!)