Morning Pages 10/24/24
I don’t want to make sense. Nothing around me does. The air, the grass. Things just are. They don’t make sense. What about me? My mind is a mess because there are so many things it wants to be. It isn’t content with just being what it is.
Growth is a difficult process, especially if you’re impatient. I’m impatient. Everyday, I grow angry because I’m not where I want to be. There is a constant incongruence between my actual life and my ideal life. I begin to wonder if that incongruence is actually something I control. Maybe the distance between the actual and the ideal is just called desire.
Desire is a dangerous thing. I’ve heard a lot of ideas about desire pretty much being a sin — a quality that is mostly bad and misleading. Of course, it has some uses. Desire is motivation, which gets us to pursue things we care about. But sometimes we pursue things we don’t care about. Sometimes we pursue things we think we care about until we get it and realize we actually didn’t care as much.
There’s a risk in wagering all your happiness on some future event you think will change your life. Everything will be fine if I get this job. Everything will be okay if I get into this college. I’ll be happy once I get a girlfriend. I’ll be happy once I have kids. But a lot of the time, when we actually get those things, the happiness flows just the same as in any other event. Maybe the magnitude is stronger, but it is guaranteed to be finite. Happiness fades, and we return to neutral, which is where we start desiring things again.
Is it possible to just be fine with being neutral? Is that contentment, or is contentment something different? Is contentment fading, just like happiness is? Or is it a lasting state? Are we capable of enduring life satisfaction?
The philosophers of old based a good amount of their thinking on the good life. They pondered different definitions of a good life, the qualities a person needs to be satisfied. I don’t know specifically the answers they came up with. I expect none of it has to do with being rich or famous or popular with people — that’s what I hear often, at least. It makes me wonder why, after millennia of thinking, many of us still fall in the same holes, misleading ourselves about what is truly valuable.
Is it valuable to live only in the present? To what extent is it still healthy to think about the past and the future? Does ruminating on the past and future cause our misery? Is staying present really the answer to many of our psychological struggles? Of course not all, but many would be impactful enough.
I wonder how many meditation sessions I would have to do before I feel like I’m constantly in meditation as I walk through life. A big meditation guy I knew advised me to never leave my meditation on the pillow. The state of awareness and presence you attain in meditation should ideally be maintained outside of meditation as well. I used to meditate a lot, but I’m not sure if I ever got to the point where I actually reached that state of enduring presence. Is that even worth it?
I realize now that I tend to overthink the steps I can take to self-improvement. I’m always fretting over what might be the most optimal choices. Too caught up in thinking that I forget to actually do things. So I get stuck standing in place and not actually taking any steps anywhere. That explains this feeling I’ve had that I’ve kinda stalled over the last few months.
