Motivation

They say that to lose weight you just need to have a good enough reason, a strong enough motivation to do what it takes. You have to say to yourself “from this day on, I simply cannot do anything to setback my goal to have a healthy body”.

They say to stay off drugs you just need to have a good enough motivation, a strong enough reason, to do what must. You have to say to yourself every single day “today I will not use, today I will not drink”.

Every day is a struggle, every hour a battle, will I eat that slice of cake, will I take those pills, will I pop into that bar, will I talk to those people, who have fallen today and could drag me with them, will I do my exercises, repeat my affirmations, reaffirm my motivations, call my sponser, read my literature.

Every day is a struggle, a fight that will never be won until the cool sweet embrace of death, that begins again every morning, every hour, every minute, every second, every breath.

And then you wonder, can’t I break free from this? If I use all my energy staving off relapse, if I use all my energy every day NOT doing things, when will I ever have energy left to DO things? When will I be free? How will my life ever be meaningful, how will it ever create anything of value to anyone, if all I ever fucking do is stop myself doing things, because whatever else happens today, I cannot use, I must not overeat.

Scarcity of Attention

I know I said I was going to write a post about weakness, but this topic struck me more today.

I was listening to Prison Sex by Tool and my mind began to meander off in a direction, I began to think about the suffering of the perpetrators. I began thinking about the suffering that being a perpetrator of “bad things” might cause someone, as well as the suffering that might lead there. Then I heard in my head an echo of a sentiment, something like “I d0n’t give a fuck how much he suffers! WHO fucking cares! Look what he has done!”, something to that effect, and it got me thinking.

Why the vi0lent reaction against empathy for “evildoers”. For the rapists, the murderers, the pedophiles. Why the horror. Against merely, internally feeling the pain of those who are “beyond the pale”? We don’t have to help them to empathise, we don’t have to pardon them, we don’t have to give them even the satisfaction of knowing that we feel their pain. The reaction is not against the threat of pardoning the murderer, the rapist, the SUV driver, it’s not against the threat of normalising the behavior of the Jihadist, the racist, the child molester. It’s against the sympathy itself, more than that, it’s against recognising in them any suffering that is alike our own.

We can recognise their suffering in a self righteous “I do pity them, they’ll never be happy” wishing upon them further ill kind of way. But never in a way that realises the tragedy of it really, because tragedy implies humanity. No, tragedy implies that the roles could be reversed. That, “there but for the grace of God go I”. That evil is not something restricted to the other, but something that could strike in our hearts as well as theirs.

Evil strikes in our hearts all the time. That’s the real tragedy. We are all rapists, murderers, nixon voters, communists, islamists. That is where the fear comes from. To empathise with evil, we must realise the depth of evil inside ourselves.

But it’s not just that. There is also, the scarcity of attention. We can only think about so many things, only care about so many things, only love so much, only feel so much, before we are scattered, exhausted, jaded. There is the very real, very valid fear, that “if I care about the guilty, I will have no compassion left for the innocent”.

But where to draw the line? Who is innocent? Who is without sin?

And beyond that, even if our attention is scarce, for everyone we attend to and reject their suffering as inhumane, we seal off a part of our heart from the capacity to love, and its not long before we have no access to any of it.

Strength…

Some people think that all that divides people from one another is ideas, that the only conflict between rhetorical me and rhetorical you is that we just don’t understand each other.

The truth is, if we did understand each other, we would realise more conflict. If we all were brutally honest about what we were in this life for, with ourselves and each other, to the point it would be impossible to not understand where we were each coming from, we would realise, that on one level, this life is a war. A war between every man woman and child on the planet for the resources, power and time to do the basic things we all need, and the less basic things we mostly want.

Because we don’t understand ourselves let alone each other, we get caught up in ideas, and ideas smooth this war down a bit. Hide it.

Not that humans are not co-operative, if it gets what they want, they are of course. That’s sensible. But never forget, some things are, must be and cannot change from being zero sum games. Sometimes we find ourselves fighting over the last loaf of bread to feed our starving children.

A noble man knows these things. He fights often and understand what he is fighting for. He knows what the game means, he knows what it means to win and what it means to lose. He understands his enemy, he knows that behind his enemy lies a parallel world to his own, a world of people, who will all suffer just as his people would have suffered if his enemy had won. A noble man knows these things, and so loves and respects his enemy, as he loves and respects himself. He sheds a tear for his fallen enemy, but he does not lose sleep. He knows what he is fighting for, what he loses if he stops. And if, or when, he loses, in his final moments, he is filled with awe for his enemy’s prowess and strength, as he dies, as he knows in his mind and in his heart, the terrors and destruction that will befall his world, of people, who he loves, he cannot help but admire the force that destroys him, and everything he knows.

But we men are not honest, and so we are not noble. We despise the things which threaten us because we are too cowardly to fight without painting the enemy as evil. We are too cowardly to admit love for the things at stake, to admit why we really fight, to admit what we really want, for ourselves, our children, the worlds of people we love. We are too ignorant to realise what is really at stake and so we are constantly assaulted by a sense of unidentified threat. An unarticulable fear, because we do not admit what it is we want, what it is that we need. We do not admit the world as it is, because we are spoiled and fattened slaves hiding behind the walls build by men before us who understood what we do not understand, eating the spoils won for us by men before us who admitted the things we don’t admit. We don’t see the world as it is, because we cannot see beyond our own corpulent chins.

The enemy is the same as us, the hippies and liberals were right, we are all the same. And we are still a threat to them, and they are still a threat to us.

…but that’s not the whole story.

Coming up next week: weakness.