Nevermore
The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it.
Life is a state of mind.
In my world, the Grateful Dead don't exist.
It is interesting yet not surprising, in a culture suffused with the grandest ideas about human potential and life's possibilities, that few people ever learn what the human mind is capable of when it applies constraint. I'm not talking about self-discipline, which is about governing your intake of what is available. Rather, I mean constraining your view of what is available, permanently. It's such an alien thought that the distinction is even perhaps elusive. Self-discipline would be limiting yourself to one cupcake a week. What I'm talking about is creating a little personal world where cupcakes don't exist, where you never have to think about whether it's time for a cupcake because you're never going to eat another cupcake as long as you live. Seriously . . . no cupcakes ever again . . . ever . . . no matter what.
My point isn't about cupcakes and it isn't about asceticism. It's about a kind of radical solution to problems that we aren't conditioned to even consider, even as we weigh solutions that are—objectively, physically, etc.—much more radical. All experience with self-discipline deceives you if you've never done something like this: all you know is how hard self-discipline is, and projecting those agonies and failures out forever seems not even worth considering. But if you can bring yourself to the settled idea that cupcakes are only in the past, only for other people, it can be very easy to maintain that state, much easier than holding out for the next cupcake. This is not self-discipline but a state of mind.
You need to pick your spots, of course. Cupcakes are tasty.
Labels: oblique wisdom
posted at 4:26 PM
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