drmstream[writing]

I don’t like shar­ing writ­ing here that’s ill-considered and unformed. The excerpt below is an excep­tion. It’s a recent note from my work­book. I’d seen a pic­ture of T & me from Mother’s Day and was dis­cour­aged by how swollen and weighted down l looked. My phys­i­cal real­ity had sep­a­rated from my self-perception. That kind of dis­con­nect is trou­bling, espe­cially when you feel happy. The dis­con­nect sug­gests that while you may be happy, you are also expe­ri­enc­ing an imbalance.

The notes are choppy, but get at the key question.

I need to cen­ter myself around a lex­i­con that rein­forces my goal of min­i­miz­ing my ego in favor of increas­ing my expe­ri­ence and explo­ration of life.

This is cap­tured in some of the bud­dhist koans I have seen. And it is cap­tured in some of the lan­guage about Jesus.

This lex­i­con needs to be famil­iar, I am con­clud­ing. The need for famil­iar­ity is cap­tured in the idea of willpower.

I mean the con­cept of “willpower” itself.

I am try­ing to stop look­ing like the swollen man I see in the pho­tographs next to my wife. My phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion is dis­con­nected from my inter­nal view of myself. I need to do some things reg­u­larly in order to bring them back together.

First, I guess, I need to shed the ways that I am see­ing myself that are not con­sis­tent with the way that other peo­ple are see­ing me. This is releas­ing van­ity, shed­ding hubris, and becom­ing more hum­ble and honest.

That lan­guage is con­sis­tent with my back­ground: a strong Catholic faith that embraced the rit­ual power of the language.

Over the past sev­eral years, I have explored how to imple­ment the tenets of behav­ioral­ism in my life. The premise is that we are a col­lec­tion of phys­i­cal impulses and intel­lec­tual adap­ta­tions that cre­ate pos­i­tive or adverse affects in our behav­ior. Adverse behav­ior is dri­ven by neg­a­tive reac­tions and ulti­mately has a bad out­come for us, phys­i­cally and emotionally.

This sci­en­tific approach has worked for me in terms of cre­at­ing an emo­tional frame­work that helps me feel con­fi­dent in the choices that I am mak­ing and the things that I am doing. It has had almost no value in terms of help­ing me con­trol my phys­i­cal urges, which, I expect, are a reac­tion to stress.

I’ve been think­ing about that inef­fec­tu­al­ness lately.

The lan­guage of behav­ioral­ism has no emo­tional res­o­nance for me. It is prag­matic, sen­si­ble, log­i­cal, clearly applied. But it is dis­tant from the roman­tic nar­ra­tive of excel­lence, piety, hero­ism and achieve­ment that was the struc­tural frame­work of my child­hood, ado­les­cence and adulthood.

So I’ve been try­ing to recover the idea of willpower in terms that are emo­tion­ally rich for me.

At the same time, I want to keep hold of the emo­tional balance.

The story that I am telling myself now can’t require that I suc­ceed com­pletely because the cost of fail­ure is the inabil­ity to exert my willpower over myself.

This per­sonal story has to be more bal­anced and for­giv­ing. It has to prac­tice humil­ity and under­stand my place in the world. My bat­tle for willpower — the abil­ity to say “I will do this” and then to fol­low through and do it — needs to be per­sonal, com­pelling and forgiving.

Maybe that is achieved within a sym­bolic con­text that is famil­iar, that resonates.

The chal­lenge is that I don’t believe in the cen­tral orga­niz­ing premise that cre­ated the momen­tum in each of these nar­ra­tives that I inserted myself into through the power of imagination.

I am not doing these things in ser­vice to God.

What I do is part of the great mys­tery and mir­a­cle of humankind.

And that sounds pretty pre­ten­tious and self-aggrandizing, when it is meant to be cen­ter­ing and humble.

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