On imposing
Sometimes I feel like I never know how to be.
Of course, I have drives, urges. Even occasional desires. But I mean: how to be. How to spend a day. How to be idle with no sense of what I should be doing. No pull to something greater or better or more meaningful. Just to be as I want to be, in the moment.
As I write this, I think to myself, I should reread Bertrand Russell's essay on this -- On Idleness -- because surely there I would find some insight I could use to make this a better post. But I'm resisting that thread because that would feel like work, and I'm trying to write this not as work, but as leisure. If true curiosity takes me there, then I'll get there, but for now, if you're reading this, you'll have to settle for my own thoughts rather than Russell's.
Interestingly, as a part of the unit that is my marriage, I feel that in that context, in many ways, the problem has disappeared for me. With my wife, a day off can be simple and free from those kinds of nagging feelings. We'll take a walk, or a drive out of town, just to get into nature and enjoy the sights and sounds, and be together. And that on its own feels good and meaningful.
Other times, as a husband, I commit to acts of service, or to doing things that maybe I won't intrinsically enjoy. But in subsuming my will to another person, out of love and duty, I find meaning, and then joy. There it isn't so much that I have learned how to be, but have found something else to embody temporarily. And I think that is good, because it is good to serve our loved ones and neighbours simply out of love.
But on my own, I still don't know how to be. Every act of leisure is a stepping stone to some other life. Some vocation. Some career move. Hobbies are the early stages of some business opportunity, or some skill development that I'll need down the line.
Or, sometimes they are ways to express love.
Notably, they are not ways to express myself. Not ways to simply be me.
Buddhists say the self is an illusion, but to me it seems like an illusion I'm failing to see. It's not that I'm enlightened. Indeed, I am still full of craving and clinging and willing for things to be different than what they are: exactly what the Buddhists say is the source of all suffering. So what is going on?
What I know is that my particular personal form of neuroticism is a pervasive aversion to imposing on anyone at any point.
If someone asks me what I want to eat, that neuroticism preempts any internal querying of my own desire and simply rejects the premise that I would answer such a question and impose my will on someone else in that way. Even when I know, rationally, the other person wants me to answer, to alleviate them from having to impose their will, I still struggle to overcome that aversion. And at that point, my mind is so twisted up and uncomfortable that I can't even feel what I want anyway -- if I answer at all, it is almost at random, something I hope will be satisfactory for the person asking the question. So is it any wonder that that internal compass of desire has fallen into disrepair?
It's easy to want things in a noncommittal way. Sure, I want to be successful and reasonably wealthy, and I want to have work-life balance and be a good husband and son and brother and friend. I want to make new friends after moving to a new city.
The problem is that actually achieving those things requires acts of will that inevitably have implications for other people. You can't make friends without first imposing your presence on them. You can't succeed at work without telling other people what you're doing and why it's valuable. You can't have work-life balance without setting boundaries according to your own priorities, and actually sticking to them when someone else bumps up against them. And connecting with your friends and family requires that you reach out to them, which imposes your presence on them, no matter how much you may rationally know that that is OK and they probably want you to do that from time to time.
I think when I'm on my own the struggle of these things weighs on me in a way that makes it feel urgent that I do something about it. But none of the actions that feel comfortable actually solve the problems, they simply distract from it. And intuitively I know that, and I feel it. So simply being feels impossible.
But the alternative to imposing the will is to drift with the current of the wind. And I'm tired of drifting.
I want to impose my will, and I suppose the first step to doing that is to impose it on myself. I want to do things because I want to do them.
So my intent is to make small steps in that direction. To choose to act in ways that advance something, whatever that may be, simply because I want that thing to be advanced. And to avoid things that simply distract from that feeling. Because that is drifting.
But this feels dangerously like moving back into the territory of work, and out of the territory of leisure. And I started this post by wondering how to once again find leisure.
But I think that's a thread to pull another day.
For now, I am going to post this, simply because I want to put myself out there and let myself be seen.