Manual Override
09 Jun 2009 Leave a Comment
It is a law of the mind that what it focuses on it eventually becomes.
— E.B. White
That quote has come to symbolise something very important to me lately.
You see, for several years — if not for most of my teenage and young-adulthood life — I lived on what I always think of as “autopilot”. I focused on nothing in particular, therefore I was nobody in particular; I was a blundering, sluggish lump, plodding through every day without any focus, any sense of direction, any real awareness of myself and who I was. I was only living for and in the moment.
I’ve wasted so much of my life doing that. And though I’ve somehow managed to become the person I am — and I’m very slowly reaching the point of liking who I am — living on autopilot is no longer good enough.
So I make up for lost time by focusing, perhaps obsessively, on who I’ve been in the past, who I am now, and who I want to be — trying to turn the whole damned fog into clay that I can mold and shape. I’m tired of just drifting on the currents; I want to be in control of where I’m going.
I have a vision of myself that I want to be — physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually (in ascending order) — the best that I can be, the most that I can achieve, the highest peaks that I can reach, in those areas. The qualities that I see in others that I admire, are simply aspects of that vision of myself that I want to be?the vision I haven’t fulfilled and will probably never fulfill … but the vision I want to continually be on the path towards. (If I keep repeating that whole motif in many of my entries here, it’s because I’m trying to keep myself focused on it — the first person I write any of this for is myself.)
But to do that — to be on that path — requires something very difficult, something I’ve barely begun to get a hold of, namely…
…conscious choice.
At every moment of every day.
To constantly fight the autopilot instinct. My soul tends toward that; my mind constantly regurgitates a hundred thousand images, sounds, words, thoughts, like being locked in a room with a hundred thousand television sets; my heart continually wrestles with a hundred shapeless, often overpowering emotions, like simultaneously being a guest on a hundred talk shows. And I tend to want to slide numbly through it all, being carried passively by the undercurrents from this moment to the next moment.
But if I want to be on the path — then I must choose to be, at every waking moment — from the moment I first open my eyes at the beginning of my day, to the moment I close them at the end of it. To remember, refine and perfect my purposes.
Or to reduce it to the essentials:
to live as fully and completely in love for the world around me as possible;
to never allow myself to be my own worst enemy, in any way, shape or form;
to never allow myself to be controlled by any negative, self-destructive instincts/emotions;
to face every experience, however good or bad, as an opportunity to learn and to grow;
and to constantly look for, and pursue, any and all ways to become the person I want to be — which encompasses all of the purposes I listed before, and is the essence of all of the above.
Yeah, it’s much easier said than done — to make a conscious and continuous choice to be on that path (or any path, for that matter) is perhaps the hardest thing anyone can do, because it’s the most contrary to the “autopilot” nature of the basic human condition. But to grow and evolve — to become a better human being — requires trying to be, at every single moment, of every single day.
Even if it’s an absolutely impossible ideal, why strive for anything less?
I don’t want to just “get by” in life — I want to get somewhere.
It’s just a matter of knowing where you want to go…
