Wednesday, January 30, 2019
6:45 a.m. Louisa Calio wants more clarity on the last few lines of “Comparisons” (Friday’s conversation). I’m not too sure of what isn’t clear, but I imagine you will know. So –?
[But, you see, the very thought of thinking about it drives you to think of doing something else – Netflix, perhaps, or another novel.
Yes, I recognize that persistent drive to escape. It feels like self-sabotage.
Think of it as true north, and see where that brings you.
Huh! You mean, maybe what I’m seeking is the very thing I must not find?
No, what you are doing is not at all what you think of yourself as doing. That’s a very different thing.
So, in practical terms, what can I (ought I) do?
If toward the end of your life you can live a summing-up, it will be well. It is a gathering of feathers, as your friend you’ve never met put it.
Hmm. Well, I guess we’ll see.]
It refers to the process you have often observed but have not rightly understood, in which you seem to sabotage your own intent, if only by inertia and reluctance. We pointed out that often the reluctance is because what you think you want is not what you really want. That is, one part of the community-of-you has one intent, another part does not, and in fact may have a contradictory intent. In such case, how do you answer our continually applied question: “Which you?” In such cases, reluctance, even sabotage, may represent your truest self preventing you from haring off in attractive but irrelevant or deleterious directions.
And that’s what you meant by calling such innate and inexplicable reluctance true north. But how can we know true north from delusion, sabotage from steadfastness?
What have we been talking about, save certain productive, reliable habits: integrity, observing the fruits of various actions and thoughts and tendencies?
Know thyself, I suppose.
Being true to yourself. Choosing who you want to be, and what ideal you choose to live toward.
So, you said we could have a summing-up.
Your lives are always journeys, and journeys of course leave one place in order to reach another. But it is well for you to spend time reflecting where you have been – that is, who you have been – not in a spirt of judgment (pass or fail, praise or condemn) but of integration (how did all this contribute to what I am?) Or, let us say, better, how does all this contribute, for of course the past is not dead or inert within you.
Jim Price’s manuscript talked of gathering his life into feathers, in the sense of remembering significant moments.
That’s the sense we mean.
Okay, thanks as always.