I notice this problem manifesting in my life all the time. The simple answer, of course, is to just make choices- become an author or co-author of the story you are living and don’t think about the counter-factuals. There is another difficulty I find, however. This is if you don’t know WHAT you want, which is often the case for me. Why don’t I know what I want? Because there’s so many things I could have, and I can’t have them all, I am wreaked with indecision. Why else? Because everyone, from peers, to family, to the movies I watch, seem to have different suggestions about what I should want. Since I don’t seem to know myself, I end up trying some of their advice, with mixed results.
I just put an end to the best dating relationship I’ve ever had, and it sucks. I thought that no matter which way the relationship went It would be a net positive. Either it would work and we’d grow together in happy coupleness, or it would fail, and we’d both be better off for it once the fallout was over.
And now that the fallout is ongoing, I feel caught in the middle. What if I made the wrong decision? I feel like if I knew what I wanted a little more concretely, I would stop living in this used-to-be-exciting world of indisicion (“keeping my options open” “living like a leaf on the wind” “remaining openminded to what the future may hold”) and live satisfactorily with some compromises for the greater end of my desire.
At what point don’t you need to know what else is out there and just be happy with what is right in front of you?
I’ve gone on a couple trips recently. They were both to interesting places, but they really just made me appreciate home, because I didn’t think these other places were anywhere near as pleasant as home, for me.
Now, is that just my own experience of home, or is my home actually better? Does it matter?
I’ve got this feeling, sometimes, like I’m supposed to go somewhere, challenge myself, live cross culturally. Maybe this is because of movies I’ve watched. Maybe its because I want to believe I have the ability to be a world-adventurer like Indiana Jones (or Walter Mitty). Maybe its because I feel like if I’m going to make a difference on the world, I need to get to where I can make a more noticeable difference. Maybe I just don’t want to believe I can’t do it, and need to prove it to myself. Perhaps its just romantisization, like joining the French legion or sailing around the world. Maybe its such a big part of how I’ve seen my future self, that now that I’m getting right into adulthood and I haven’t done what it took to get there, I am disappointed in myself. Like how some would say I should’ve dated more girls. Like some would have said I should have traveled more, and others would have said I should’ve just done what made me happy more. Instead I did a little bit of each and got a whole lot of nowhere. Well, not no-where, but no were specific, and I still don’t know where I’m headed. Some people know. Some people look at my indisicion as a good thing, see it as flexibility, but there’s a problem if I always thing I should be doing something else somewhere else to fulfill my adolescent, joseph Campbell mythical idea of myself. I’m living a story now, not later. And this is disturbing too, because it doesn’t always look like a very good story. No arc. No victories or conclusions. But if there’s certain future versions of myself that I can’t visualize for the hero epic, maybe I am hamstringing my choice-making procedure- kind of like how an earlier blog talked about how we don’t know all the possibilities that may await us, if we could just see them to try them. So I need to accept that many futures are possible, but that doesn’t help me know which is best. Guess it doesn’t matter. I make the best decisions I can now, and stop expecting good things to happen. I might not always get what I want, but, hell, maybe I’ll still get what I need.
I think its time to take another page from Merton
“One of the most important—and most neglected—elements in the begninnings of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the be beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us in the creatures of God. We do not see these things because we have withdrawn from them. In a way we have to. In modern life our senses are so constantly bombarded with stimulation from every side that unless we developed a kind of protective insensibility we would go crazy trying to respond to all the advertisments at the same time!
The first step in the interior life, nowadays, is not, as some might imagine, learning not to see and taste and hear and feel things. On the contrary, what we must do is begin by unlearning our wrong ways of seeing, tasting, feeling, and so forth, and acquire a few of the right ones.
For asceticism is not merely a matter of renouncing television, cigarettes, and gin. Beofre we can begin to be ascentics, wefirst have to learn to see life as if it were something more than a hypnotizing telecast. And we must be able to taste something besides tobacco and acohol: we must perhaps even be able to tast these luxuries themselves as if they too were good.
How can our conscience tell us whether or not we are renouncing things unless it first of all tells us that we know how to use them properly? For renunciation is not an end in itself: it helps us to use things better. It helps us to give them away….
In an aesthetic experience, in the creation or the contemplation of a work of art, the psychological conscience is able to attain some of its highest and most perfect fulfillments. Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
