One of the mistakes we make is convincing ourselves that who we are is who we think we are. If such a thing as identity exists, is it rooted in our aspirations, but in what we actually do? While it may be comforting to think that what we aspire to is the truest representation of ourselves, the more pragmatic view is that what we do is a much more accurate representation, because of the real-world consequences. Intentions only go so far, and aspirations can wander into delusion and grandiosity.
I've always thought that what we really want is reflected in what we do, because habits represent what we want. It's counterintuitive, but why do we believe that our high-minded self-image trumps our more automated behavior? Isn't what we do proof of what we want MORE? Maybe Bourdieu's "systems of lasting dispositions" reflects more of what we want than what we think and say? Or maybe it's proof of who we are, with our habitual behaviors existing as reinforcement mechanisms.
We're wired to always focus on what is missing; what we don't have. So our high-minded idealistic selves will always push back reflexively against whatever regime of habits we're currently administering. If you work long hours, the ideal becomes to have more fun; if your life is mostly leisure, you aspire to "get it together". This constant antagonism with the self creates the illusion that we must change, when in reality we are changing daily, whether we mean to or not, and despite our habits. The will is far weaker, and our prefrontal cortex likes to generate grandiose visions of who we are and could be. The truth is that all of these factors are duking it out inside of us, and who we ultimately become reflects the outcome of this struggle.
Astute as always, Tamara. Reading you is one habit I have no desire to change.
Habits don’t only encode what we want. They also carry what was there when we were too young to want otherwise. Bourdieu’s point is that dispositions get laid down by class before the will even enters the room, so reading them as pure desire flatters them. The kid who never had books didn’t want less to read.
You’re right about the see-saw, where whatever you have becomes the thing to flee. Still, I’d not crown the brawl’s winner as the self. Sometimes the loudest faction wins, not the truest.
Thank you for your provocative and fascinating comments, Andrew!
I really love where you’ve taken this. It opens up a whole new avenue for me, and I think I’ll see myself a little differently now. Perhaps our behaviour is a kind of mirror, sometimes more honest than the story we tell ourselves about who we are. Thank you for adding this layer.
Monod said, "Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is we will do nothing." It's that stuck place, whether out of habit or fear or desire, that does us in, and, by extension, stymies and may even destroy others.
He earned that line, he spent a war in the Résistance watching which neighbours did the small things and which found reasons not to. The person frozen at their own threshold usually stands in a doorway someone else needed to walk through. Not doing nothing is a strange verb to have to conjugate, but here we are.
Grateful you brought Monod here, he belongs to this essay, Andi.
I have memorized few "live by" quotations, but that one has stayed with me since I was a 19-year-old college student. My mom sent it to me, in a letter. She was replying to my sorry-for-myself complaint that I'd not been selected for a job I really wanted and was oh-so-close to getting. Clearly, I had some small things to attend to.
A cross-stitch platitude would’ve been the easy send but your mother picked the biologist who parses inaction into two failures and hands you the sharper one. And she was right about the small things. I love that she knew that a quote arrives differently on paper.
That conjugation has some dexterity: not doing nothing about nothing makes it a "nothing burgher" with nothing on it, for everybody, like "the science" being deployed during Covid, doing nothing to prove it, the virus, actually existed and nothing to verify they were "safe and effective" that was made into restrictive nothing burghers many millions had to swallow with nothing on them, lettuce, catsup, mayo, i.e. meaningless protocols: quarantines, masks , distances, et cetera, based on the habit of a certified hierarchy of authority gone rogue.
The pun’s got some spring to it, the nothing burgher served to everyone with nothing on it, I’ll give you that, Michael!! But I’d slow down on the leap from “authorities made mistakes” to “the thing itself was nothing”. Institutions can absolutely go rogue and turn into habit, that’s my essay’s worry about certified hierarchies. But error in the response isn’t proof of absence in the cause. A rogue authority can still be reacting to something real, just badly. Two separate ledgers. Thank you for the wordplay!
You move from habit to fear to desire, each obstacle harder to name than the last, which mimics the psychic labor it describes.
Cybernetics has a term for your "churning that never stops" — homeostasis, a system's tendency to resist change by absorbing disruption as new normal. Modernity didn't remove the barriers to change, it became a self-correcting system that metabolizes rebellion into content, feedback, another day. The stillness is the system succeeding at its actual job.
The word hides cruelty inside homeostasis… the system doesn't fight you, it welcomes you. Every thermostat is polite. You push, it adjusts, it thanks you, nothing moves. But a thermostat has no unconscious, it runs on a set point someone else chose. Desire is the one signal it can't absorb because it was never trying to be legible in the first place. That's what Lacan is doing there, adding a variable the loop can't read.
Clara, thank you for bringing the engineering diagram to my philosophical rambling!
Tamara, we mistake “rehearsal” for readiness. I spent a year "preparing" to quit a job, yeah, journaling, planning, imagining, you name it. The prep itself became the treacle. I only moved when I stopped narrating the leap and just missed a deadline on purpose, forcing the door shut behind me.
We let contemplation impersonate courage. Beautifully argued essay. The art moved me to tears.
The self-sabotage-as-liberation move is more cunning than it looks. You couldn’t leap forward, so you demolished the ground behind you, which tricks your own risk-aversion into serving you. Odysseus at the mast, only reversed to force action instead of resisting it. The journaling year wasn’t wasted, but you’re right, it became a place to live rather than a road out. Effort disguises stall beautifully.
Thank you for telling me about the art, Céline! It means a lot to me.
Tamara, the paintings chosen here are the smartest part of the essay, maybe smarter than the essay knows.
The Piranesi is habit because it isn't a trap in the gothic sense,,nobody's chained to that staircase but the man in the foreground, and even he could walk up it. The horror is that the stairs “function”. They carry weight, they lead somewhere plausible, and they still arrive nowhere. That's habitus, not a wall, a mechanism that keeps producing motion without displacement. De Nomé earns his place doubly, the picture is the one irreversible instant (masonry doesn't un-fall), and the painter himself was the fear made biographical: an outsider so marginal that his most famous canvas spent centuries wrongly titled, misread as spectacle. And Dossi illustrates the “result” of correctly identified desire, men getting their faces back. That's the only one of the three images that shows completion rather than paralysis or rupture, which tracks: reform and revolution are processes, but self-recognition is closer to an event.
There's a fourth mode sitting between Montaigne's reform and the revolutionary's clean break, the reversible intervention. It's the principle behind how damaged paintings get restored. The rule is that new paint must sit only on the loss, must be made of different, identifiable material than the original (visible under UV, sometimes even up close), and must be removable without harming what's underneath. The object changes. The change is real, visible in ordinary light. But it's built to confess itself as an addition, and to be undone by whoever comes after with better judgment or better information.
That's a third way to hold your own life that isn't gentler habit-work and isn't Montaigne's oysters, but isn't the irreversible break either. Make the change, but make it in a material that admits it's a change, legible, dated, not disguised as having always been there, and not staked on being permanent. It's less romantic than the break Lacan's desire demands. But it's honest about the fact that most of us don't get one clean gesture. We get successive campaigns of revision, each one a considered guess by someone who knew less than the next version of us will. The dignity is in refusing to paint over the seam.
The reversible intervention belongs in the essay. Conservation ethics as ethics, full stop! Cesare Brandi built a theory of restoration on refusing to fake the lost passages, filling losses with hatched neutral tone that never pretends to be the master’s hand. You’ve lift it off the panel and onto the self, and it holds. Make the change in honest material, dated, legible, undoable by whoever comes after with better light.
Thank you for the fourth way and for reading the pictures harder than I dared to! Fabulous!
“Go up a flight of stairs. Cross the road to say “hello” to a friend. But something stops us. Our limbs have seized up, nearly paralyzed, moving as though through treacle. The goal that was so plainly within reach turns unreachable. It slips away. It’s gone. And we wake up. But in our waking lives, don’t we feel much the same thing?”
Yes, I think we’ve all had this experience, in both dream and awake states, but part of the problem must surely be mistaking the efficacy of the desired goal with the certainty of knowing the right steps to reach, achieve, that goal. I like what Andrew said: “One of the mistakes we make is convincing ourselves that who we are is who we think we are.” I’d only say, “But best we find out!”
This may be too simplistic, but let’s say I want to write a book of fiction, a novel. I can see it, feel it, taste it—it’s a living thing for me. But I don’t know if I have the ability and skills to actually write the book. But there’s a time-honored way to find out—study and practice creative writing. Read the masters. Get the fundamentals of grammar, sentence structure and vocabulary down. Learn fiction’s language—the plot, the theme, the characters, dialog, and intermixing the arc (the pacing, the tone, the purpose) of all of them.
I get halfway through the learning and realize: this is too damn hard. This is more than dexterity with words, more than skill. It is art, or meant to be, it is subjective, it is far, far more than I originally thought it was. And oh btw, who will buy this book? Wait! Who will even publish it? And on and on…before the paralysis comes the doubts.
And then we hear people say, “If I’d have known how crazy hard it was to write a novel, I might never have begun.”
What’s the difference? One might say ‘Courage!’; another might say ‘Carelessness!’; our families might say, ‘Crazy as a loon!’
But our best friend or maybe a couple friends, or even a total stranger who reads us on the interwebs, might say, “Just do it! Learn as you go. Don’t give up your day job, but don’t give up your dreams, either!”
Uhhhhmmm…go back to the part about ‘don’t give up your day job.’
Well, unless you are wealthy or have a patron or a spouse who will support you while you pursue this wild ducks scenario (let’s say for the sake of the story that you do not have or are any of these) …you should keep your day job so you can eat, have a roof over your head, buy paper, and a laptop and pens and books!”
And if the answer to that is: “But if I can’t give everything—my soul, my heart, all my time, my best thinking—all of it to my novel, then I can’t write it,” okay fine. Then just keep your day job. Forget the novel.
You see, your “best thinking” got you to this point, except you aren’t really willing to forgo the inconvenience of having to be a self-sustaining adult. Bummer. Before the full attempt comes the dawn!
Look, we can’t all be a full-tilt boogie Dostoevsky suggesting the plot of his new novel involves a sick, tired, old man with no prospects to a kind-hearted stenographer named Anna who thinks the novel is a great idea and oh, btw, I’ll marry you, keep you organized and keep us solvent, too, thing.
Part of me want to say, “Oh, I get it,” and the other part wants to say “Just do it and shut up about it, or, see you after you get home from work!”
This is a whole one-act play in a comment, T, and I love that you let it argue with itself!
The romantic myth says the novel demands all of you or nothing. Soul, heart, best thinking, the works. And you’ve spotted the con inside that demand. It’s often not a permission slip to never start. If it has to be everything, then the day job becomes a noble excuse, and you get to keep the dream pristine by never testing it against a blank page. Clean hands. Untouched vision. No rejection letters, because no manuscript. I know this too well… how many times I’ve used the same excuses!
But the day job isn’t the enemy of the novel. Constraint is where most of the good ones got written. Trollope did his 3 hours before dawn then went and ran the postal service, invented the pillar box while he was at it. Kafka had the insurance office. Stevens sold insurance too and wrote some of the century’s strangest poems on the walk to work. The unlimited time you think you need would probably sink you because nothing focuses a sentence like knowing you’ve got 40 minutes before the commute and that’s all you get.
Dostoevsky wrote “The Gambler” in about a month, under a contract so predatory he’d have lost the rights to everything if he missed the deadline. Anna Snitkina, the stenographer, wasn’t the reward for genius but the logistics that made the genius survivable. Every artist you envy for their freedom had an Anna, or a pension, or a postal salary, or a wife whose own book never got written. The freedom is nearly always somebody else’s labour, uncredited….
So find out! That’s the only line I’d underline in your whole monologue. You don’t discover whether the novel’s in you by quitting everything and staring at the ceiling with all that ruinous free time. You find out at the edges of a working life, in the stolen hour, badly at first. The book that gets written around a job is worth more than the masterpiece protected from ever existing. This is a sort of note to myself.
Thank you for the play, and for loving the art. I put a lot of thinking and time in order to choose the best art to illustrate my essays!
P.S. Piranesi would have appreciated a comment that climbs its own staircase and cheerfully arrives back where it started.
Tamara: "Clean hands. Untouched vision. No rejection letters, because no manuscript. I know this too well… how many times I’ve used the same excuses!"
Me too, T., me too. Until the day I didn't. But there is such a thing as being unready, unprepared, when opportunity knocks...I know that one, too. But, then, eventually, if it's to be...and for me, it was. To think I recuperated and regrouped from once being unready when the big chance came...makes me nervous to recall. Another story, another time!/t
The unready-when-it-knocked story is the one you skipped past, and I notice you did it with a shiver. Worth honouring why that memory frightens more than the years of excuses do. The excuses were safe, no verdict ever came, but being unready when the real chance arrived, is the one time the door actually opened and you saw yourself not walk through. That’s a near miss that haunts because it was so close to going the other way. Glad you regrouped after. Tell that story sometime, T!
This strikes me is a couple of different ways. The first is your statement that, "Everything is forever in motion." I hadn't thought of that as making it harder to make a big change in life, but now it's out there and I'm thinking about it. It reminds me of being on the playground when I was young, and jumping rope. Most of us could do it fairly easily, but when a second rope was added and you were jumping two ropes at once, it became much more difficult. Things in life are constantly changing, and some changes are easily absorbed or ignored, while others cause quite the disturbance. It makes me want to pay close attention to what happens inside me when things change, and how do my own actions change or not when things happen.
Habits as something that prevents change makes sense. We are comfortable, things work the way we want or the way we're used to, and we want it to stay that way. I'll admit that looking at my habits and where I felt they were taking me was the major reason for making a change last year, and leaving everything (mostly) behind. I'd made a move post-pandemic with an intention that didn't play out the way I'd hoped. Finding Museguided and our subsequent conversations helped me to wake up to the very dangerous direction I was headed, and I dropped or sold everything and left.
Fear is something with which I'm very familiar, and I feel like I've become intimate with its many forms. For me, the most insidious fear is the fear that I might be kidding myself, and getting it wrong. That came up the other day, because I've been here now for several months, and I've tried to firm up plans to stay longer. Part of that is practical, part is what I think I need to do now. But I keep getting blocked or held up in those plans, and find myself instead of letting go and moving on to another plan, fighting to stick with this one. And I question that. There's a part of me that questions why I'm fighting, am I looking for easy and think I've found it? Or do I really think this is where I need to be right now?
I question in at least in part because I've worked with teachers who have said to follow the flow of the river (in life), and it's made sense to me. Still, despite their teaching, I find myself trying to reach the riverbank and stop for at least a while. And I wonder if I'm afraid of going or afraid of staying?
It kind of ties in with your final point about searching for yourself, then staying faithful to what you find. With all the moving parts forever in motion, sometimes it's hard to see.
Sure, follow the river! But the double rope isn’t a river. A river has one current. What you describe is being asked to read two turning ropes at once, and the reason it’s hard is that there’s no single flow to find. Two ropes, two rhythms, and only one of you.
On the afraid-of-going-or-staying question, I don’t think you have to solve it in that form, because it might be a false pair. The river teaching assumes movement is truer than stillness. But sometimes the fight to stay on the bank is the current, and letting go and drifting on is the easy thing. Getting held up over and over on the plans to stay could be résistance. It could also just be the world being the world, visas and money and logistics, and you reading tea leaves in what’s only friction. I honestly can’t tell you which from here. But I’d notice that you called the fear of kidding yourself the most insidious one. It only ever accuses you of wanting the easy thing. It never once considers that staying might be the hard thing and you’ve earned it.
Thank you for telling me that, Doc! Watch the ropes, not the river.
Beautiful, if heartbreaking. And this is why I do initiation work. An ancient technology whose original recipe none of us can know for certain and yet whose chthonic, life-death-life promise is the forever blueprint. Because change is both an incredibly human and inhumanly difficult feat. I have found, through being guided in and guiding others through a very specific yet wholly bespoke-for-each-person ritual death and rebirth process, something becomes available that was before out of reach. What I love about it so much isn’t that suddenly everything aligns and the sky opens and pours all our dearest dreams onto us, or that we suddenly become who we most believe ourselves to be, deep down. It’s not even that it helps us face our fears of change or that it helps us be in conversation, not opposition, with the motion (though it very much does help with these two great challenges you name). It’s more that, through initiation, I have come to know myself and how it is I uniquely belong beyond and beneath everything I choose to do or that happens to me. And from that place, I am able to be fully here, more alive, a little more of myself a little more of the time. Less glamorous, perhaps, than the dramatic change most spend whole lives seeking, yet far closer to the deeper longing to belong and to come fully alive that I believe we all crave.
As one of my most beloved mentors says about initiation work ~ it’s not going to suddenly make life easier, to change, to be initiated into your gifts, to say yes to change… in fact, it’s actually more likely to bring more trouble to your door, at least at first. But it is going to make life more exciting, more your own, more ensouled… more alive.
Initiation differs from therapy, personal development and many other kinds of attempts at personal change because it presents us with and helps us navigate an irreversible threshold crossing. This always begins with naming what is ending. What I have found, guiding hundreds of women, is that this death-without-dying is the most often missing element behind why people cannot take that next step you speak of here. The reason we cannot bear the fear change brings up, amidst the endless motion, is precisely that we never slow down long enough to really, really be with what exactly is ending which is bringing on the change. And then, to grieve that ending. To bury the dead. To sacrifice the precious old way and watch it burn to utter ash in the fire, with love. With gratitude. We have to grieve the ritual wash! Lament the disappearance of toast! It's truly that painstaking...
Only then can the next step be taken. And the next and the next. And this will always bring up that third obstacle you named. Initiation helps us face the either-or inner war and step into the terrifying but liberating reality of both-and. Still, we will have to kill some desires to say yes to others. Then, we find out there is no right or wrong. But there is the need to give a good death to things in order to truly live.
You might say the culture has become so obsessed with Life, life ,life, life (read: endless productivity and motion), it has come to fear all kinds of death. Death, when taken out of the equation, creates a kind of living hell of endless motion without the true movement we wish. Initiation restores this. Initiation restores Death to its rightful throne.
It's extemely challenging for me to take things step by step and to pause. I, too, live here amongst us. Interestingly, in my efforts to get better at just the next best step, I have decided to pause-- to stop the never-ending motion-- on one thing in my life. And I already feel my ability to move in the ways I most long to move opening up!
Cheers to the next best step. The next threshold crossing, and all it’s known and unforeseen initiatory invitations. It’s really all any of us have.
To be honest, I am extremely grateful for your comment, Ama, since you’ve restored the missing middle term that my essay was missing. I am talking about… grief. I moved from habit to fear to desire and skipped what’s beneath all three: nothing new gets built on ground you haven’t first buried the old thing in. I treat the ritual wash and the toast as enemies of change. You’ve caught that they are also the dead requiring burial, and you don’t get to skip the funeral. That’s the correction I will keep. Thank you for that!
The point about a culture phobic of death producing motion-without-movement is the mechanism, you said it so much better than me. Endless Life, capital L, refusing every small death, is how you end up churning in place. You can’t cross a threshold you won’t let the old self die at. I couldn’t really see it without you here. Initiation restoring Death to its throne, impressive! Thank you for insisting we grieve the toast. I meant it half as a joke and you’ve shown me it was actually essential. Thank you again!
It’s the best damn joke ever, and between the two of us, I do believe we have a dirge to sing some life back into the changes we most long for! I’m deeply honored to have inspired you… I hope to someday be in-person in a salon discussion of epic proportions!! I have a whole class on giving a good death… even to toast… and for the record, I still try to skip the funeral alllllll the time because, as you point out, old habits die hard. But maybe, just maybe, it’s not the “hard” part we’re so trained to focus on in that truth, but the “die” part that longs for our utmost attention. ;) I love our brains.
Yes, we are drilled to hear “die hard” as a complaint about difficulty when the verb carrying all that work is die. The habit’s stubbornness is the thing asking to be mourned properly. A salon with you in the room would be marvellous!! Consider the invitation extended.
What stayed with me was the paradox of being surrounded by constant motion and still feeling unable to make the one change that actually belongs to us. We can become so practiced at adapting that adaptation itself starts to look like growth.
Maybe that’s the harder question underneath all of this: not can I change? but which change would bring me closer to myself rather than simply make me easier for the world to use?
There’s adaptation that fits you to the world, and there’s the one that fits the world a little more to you. The first is what employers mean by flexible, and it hollows you out, one accommodation at a time. Your question is really asking how to tell real growth from pliability, and I think the tell is direction of travel. Pliability always bends toward what’s convenient for others. The change worth making usually costs someone your compliance. Thank you for coming back to read!
I love your idea that it’s not change for the sake of change, but the courage to stop betraying your own desire. I’ve changed my life completely, and it was very much what I wanted. But some parts of that change turned out to be deeply painful. There were losses I couldn’t have anticipated, and life took a turn I could never have prepared for. You can plan for a big change, but you can’t really prepare for the “black swan” moment, the unforeseen thing that suddenly changes the whole landscape.
I’m still rebuilding, but I would make the leap again. Perhaps that’s the nature of real change: it asks for a huge amount of risk, because there is no way of knowing where you’ll land.
The black swan exposes a lie inside how we usually talk about brave choices. We say “I’d do it again” as if that settles the ledger, but notice that it can only refuse to let losses be the whole story. You say the leap was yours, and the black swan wasn’t a verdict on it. Taleb’s whole point was that the unforeseeable can’t be planned into, only built to withstand. You survive the swan by being the person who rebuilds. Which you’re doing. Thank you for the honesty about the losses, few people admit that leap!
Thank you. I think there’s something very humbling about not knowing exactly where a choice will take you. You make the best decision you can with what you know at the time, and then you keep moving, adapting and discovering what comes next. Maybe that’s part of the adventure too.
The calculus is just too demanding. Change begs for projection; it shouts Out! It requires space, some distance between our nose and our unknown. Comfort favors expectation. It reigns in the mirror where our nose knows what it sees. So the math gets tangled. The further out our desire projects us, the greater unpredictability increases its proportional weight. Expectations erode under this compounding complexity. Comfort detests the test. Change tastes the tease. The tension of this building uncertainty challenges the whole enterprise. Dis-ease develops. Desire pushes, while indecision pulls. We have one foot on the gas, one on the brake. Wheels spin. A weak, but chronic anxiety settles in the body. Every step confirms one bias or the other and the body shakes and cracks under competing pressures. We cannot know the outcome of a decision before it plays out and the ease of the modern world makes that fact feel really disagreeable to us. In a crusade, or a gold rush, or a ten-year plan to send men to the moon the desire and the expectation line up and march in rhythm. In a world where a job pays the bills, and norms fit the bill, desires and expectations play off each other. But in a world where any and every dream is "possible" none can find the right sine/cosine to hold the angles. The structure collapses. When Cupid's arrows fly at Gatling Gun speed, the heart explodes in exhaustion. Tread carefully. Walk slowly. Follow the path as nimbly as your courage allows you. Let the joys that emerge confirm its bias into the next step. None of it is easy. That's all I know for sure.
Uncertainty scales with distance, the further out desire flings you, the wider the cone of possible outcomes, and the body reads that widening as threat. Prediction error is metabolically expensive. The organism would rather be reliably bored than expensively surprised.
Acute fear you can discharge, you run or you fight and it’s over. But the foot-on-both-pedals state has no discharge, so it just idles in the tissue, low and constant, wearing the engine down without ever crashing the car, a hum that never shuts off.
Let the joys that emerge confirm the bias into the next step. You take a step and see whether gladness follows, and you let that be the only instrument you trust. The moon-shot had its desire and expectation marching in lockstep, sure, but nobody gets a countdown for their own life, using pleasure as a compass needle. It’s slower. It might be the only honest method there is.
Scary how to make a leap can be especially when plunging myself into something new in search for a deeper meaning to my life and a solid structure of identity. Anyways as I grow older I just learn to risk it all and prepare myself for the consequences whatever they may be. This is beautiful T. Will have to reread again for deeper digestion.
The bracing part is a bit of a trick. You prepare for consequences and then the ones that actually show up are never the ones you rehearsed. You packed a coat, turns out the problem was your shoes. And people who leap better later on, I don’t think it’s courage exactly. They’ve just quit expecting the landing to owe them anything.
Thank you for saying you’ll come back to it, Karl, that’s the nicest thing a reader can promise!
strangely, when i had my great epiphany a few years back and started to feel again, and to write, my first landing was on the idea that we have to be happy to feel our desire at all, but do not have to lean in to wishing for it's outcome. that was a kind of relief to me then, soon to be furiously understood to be a lie that society gave me, the lie in order to stay stuck in my position, to not use my desire as a guiding star to where it might show itself where i need to go, preventing change and making stability and solidity the greater goals. i was content to just be able to have contact to it, my inner wishes, and thought the greatest achievement of sovereignty over self and it's lower impulses is to keep desire in check, just to observe it without acting on it.
my fury now is mostly about this lie and my certainty of it to be the best to obey it, loosing so much time, chances, lovely people's patience and mine. i cherish my desires now and take them to be my compass to find directions on my path. i find my moods more reliable as guides then my responsible thoughts. its chaotic, i admit. but there's far more intelligence in it, no more praying to order and constance in a prudent life: the offering of self on the altar of boredom, the cruelest of gods.
Non-attachment was meant to free you from craving that enslaves, and what you received was non-attachment used to keep you from wanting your way out. Same technique, opposite master. Authentic equanimity makes you more able to act rightly. Your moods as compass, chaotic but intelligent, though the compass swings. Desire points, but not every reading is true north. Trust it, verify it against the wreckage. Thank you for the altar of boredom, the cruellest god, Ivy! That phrase is going to haunt me.
wonderful how you read me, to hand me back a more precise reading of what i just crudely drew, in between reading your essay and the next task, to allow my own understanding to fully form around my sketch. thank you for filling in colour and more decisive lines. precision really is one of your most defined talents, among a cohort of them of course.
i love how you never just through back the ball of yarn (that in itself is an additional gift to your writing), but to add a few more rounds to even out the curve, to fill it in a little more where needed, and throw it back more complete!
You’re a poet, Ivy, the yarn-ball image is generous, and I’ll confess the method behind it: I think a reply’s job is to hand your thought back having grown a little in the passing. You did the throwing. I just refuse to catch without adding a round. it happens that we are on the same page.
There’s a great deal to parse out and ruminate over, here.
I’m reading two phenomena happening in tandem: a social implication, and an individual, subjective implication, and I’m getting the sense that they’re sort of both linked. I would actually caution against that, because you always have a sort of post hoc causality hazard, and it could be that both what’s happening socially (again, depending on where you are) and personally, have a common root.
Obviously, in the cases where the church or the monarchy ruled by fiat and decree, there had yet to be evolution or development of the hazards of individuals. In fact, it may have come to pass that by abandoning monarchy and feudalism, we may have simply displaced the danger and not detected the full breadth of it yet. At least when you knew the duchy wanted their taxes or the church wanted its tithe, you knew where the fangs were coming from.
It’s sort of hard for me to sympathize with many of such examples except by a sort of natural human empathy type of understanding, so I really don’t have so much to say about it that hasn’t been O, so eruditely lain out already.
But I actually believe - in theory, at least - that liberalization of everyone may not have been a good idea (in fact, I guarantee it). Individuality requires hoisting of burdens you normally have others help out with. Those without the requisite constitution to be their own ass of burden are prone to follies and foibles. Particularly if they’re not used to an easy sense of direction.
Therefore, I think many goals are out of reach simply because they are designed that way; they are not goals at all. They are illusions. And it’s easy to castigate yourself and give yourself a reason to quit if you chase after illusions in the first place. Or worse: some don’t even know the difference.
It certainly doesn’t help that there is a concentrated effort to foment fear amongst people who don’t know any better by other people who don’t care. That’s another problem of the dissolution of community: people are not ingrained or inculcated with the sense of responsibility to neighbour, primarily because one now often does not need to see his neighbour at all.
Now, I sort of live like that, so I know a thing or two, and I can say that it’s easy to fret over all the examples one can behold, particularly curated as they are in a sort of natural selection that winds up getting broadcast on the internet. Really, I think examples abound of people who, more or less, accomplish reasonable goals. It’s just you’re not going to see a lot of traffic on a story like that. Nothing salacious. Not enough scandal.
I also think another trivium worth keeping in mind is the intense population growth in the last century. At the turn (1900), there were only between one and two billion people. A century later, there were seven and a half billion. That’s a more than sevenfold increase of global population against a backdrop of cultures that had, more or less, been in their then-present state for thousands, if not tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands in some cases, of years. All the institutions were bound to crumble. It’s a shock.
Your caution about post hoc causality is a methodologically sober note. The social loosening and the individual paralysis may indeed be co-symptoms rather than cause-and-effect, twin efflorescences of some deeper substratal shift, and the candidate you gesture toward, sheer demographic inundation, is more explanatory than it first appears. Institutions are not abstractions floating above us but ratios, densities, thickenings of repeated human contact, and when you septuple the denominator inside a single century you dissolve the very intimacy-conditions that let the old forms cohere in the first place. A village of 200 absorbs deviance; a megalopolis of 20 million can only surveil it.
Then, I don’t think the problem is that too many were handed a freedom their constitution couldn’t bear, which slides too easily toward a rather chilly sortation of the fit from the unfit. I think the problem is subtler and sadder… we distributed the burden of self-authorship universally while withdrawing, simultaneously, every frame that once made it survivable, the guild, the parish, the extended kin-web, the shared eschatology. Freedom without infrastructure is abandonment. The feudal subject at least knew the vector of the fangs, as you so vividly put it, whereas the modern one is bitten from everywhere and nowhere and told the toothmarks are self-inflicted.
The cruelty is hat the phantasm-chasing is now monetised upstream by parties who profit from the perpetual not-arriving. The carrot is not simply out of reach, someone is selling tickets to the reaching. How funny! How sad! At the same time.
Anyway, dear Ian, thank you for the demographic long-view! Few people think in population curves, and fewer still connect the raw arithmetic of bodies to the felt texture of institutional collapse. But expected from you :)
That’s more or less the gist: the infrastructure that would have made supporting individualism within the social context tenable collapsed under the weight of sheer influx.
Now, whether a sort of communal compassion was part of that infrastructure, or has simply become a casualty of impetuosity and developmental vicissitudes is the part I can’t really assign conclusively. I couldn’t even begin to speculate. It’s certainly conceivable that there’s an individual volition to help, but it’s daunting when very few individuals want to participate. It coalesces into an enormous collective action problem, which is the state we find ourselves in currently.
Actually, the perpetual not-arriving was more or less what I was implying by stating goals as convenient illusions. What I didn’t mention were the opportunists abetting the behaviour for their own ends, and I’m glad you brought that up.
Con art and exploitation have been around since the dawn of both mutual awareness and commodity surplus. But in the absence of a central moral vanguard, it threatens to become a cottage industry. So not only do you have the ready-prep demographic of confused, directionless people (serfs in a former age); you have those who sell them fraudulent treasure maps as a way of asserting their own individual will in an individual age.
I’m careful about the associations between institutions and individual will since I admit to a prejudice of being leery about it, but it’s a plausible explanation. I thank you for entertaining it. 🌷
The collective action problem names why individual goodwill keeps evaporating: compassion has a coordination threshold, below which each willing person looks around, sees no one moving, and rationally holds back. It isn’t that the volition died. It’s stranded, each helper waiting for a quorum that never assembles. As for the fraudulent treasure maps becoming a cottage industry, that’s the grim genius of it… the disorientation and the cure for the disorientation are sold by the same hand. Thank you, Ian!
What if the self in this "uni-context" world has become so unwieldy to manoeuvre because the goal posts for our local parameters for change have gone global, so the options are overwhelming to even contemplate let alone to ever enact?
Add the sense of collective humanity being on the verge of a change of epoch, aka an Aquarian Age being ushered in, as I type this now over the internet, with the profound awareness of good and evil, held in my very hands, as we all are conscious of the change we need from the nihilistic course we are on.
Who am I, what to do, how to be, I feel needs a vantage point Moss points out so well: we need to see ourselves through the POV of our death. In the way of Lacan, at its deepest, the Otherworld, where I can see for myself life, after life, "dying before I die". It sounds impractical, and that's why the loop keeps looping, on the Monday to Friday stairs leading nowhere.
But as our idols in full force on the capitalist loom of overkill are being broken under the sheer weight of their resource depleting maintenance, and as Circe here at this transformative "heyiya" moment with the wand of "disenchantment", together makes sense of choice now as an imaginal act of reinhabiting our lives nakedly, as Inanna descends into the underworld, and the real becomes the dream it has always been.
Awesomely prodigious of you to take on this theme Tamara, it lands in my life like the watershed I'm living on, and can only now fathom the full ramifications of the complex interweave of factors involved in this Gaian world of ours, to encounter going forward, just to be!
When the reference group for your one life becomes every life visible through the screen, the comparison set is infinite, and an infinite comparison set is functionally a paralysing one. Kierkegaard saw the shape of this before the internet handed it a delivery system. He called dread the dizziness of freedom, the vertigo you feel looking down into your own possibility. More possibility, more dizziness. We built a machine that maximises the looking-down. Of course the legs lock.
The Stoics drilled it daily, memento mori, as a lens that sorts the trivial from the essential fast. Heidegger made being-toward-death the one thing that individuates you out of the anonymous crowd, the “they” that lives your life for you until you remember it ends. So “dying before you die” is the only altitude from which you can see they are circular.
Then every generation has believed itself standing exactly at the hinge of history, and that conviction is itself a kind of comfort because a watershed absolves you. If the age is turning anyway, the pressure’s off the single frightened person deciding whether to move on a Tuesday. Circe’s wand disenchants, yes, and I’d let it disenchant the epoch story a little too. The change still has to be enacted by one set of hands, yours, at ordinary human scale, on no cosmic schedule. Inanna hangs on the hook in the underworld for three days and nobody ushers her down but her own choosing.
Thank you for bringing the whole pantheon to the doorstep, Michael!
One of the mistakes we make is convincing ourselves that who we are is who we think we are. If such a thing as identity exists, is it rooted in our aspirations, but in what we actually do? While it may be comforting to think that what we aspire to is the truest representation of ourselves, the more pragmatic view is that what we do is a much more accurate representation, because of the real-world consequences. Intentions only go so far, and aspirations can wander into delusion and grandiosity.
I've always thought that what we really want is reflected in what we do, because habits represent what we want. It's counterintuitive, but why do we believe that our high-minded self-image trumps our more automated behavior? Isn't what we do proof of what we want MORE? Maybe Bourdieu's "systems of lasting dispositions" reflects more of what we want than what we think and say? Or maybe it's proof of who we are, with our habitual behaviors existing as reinforcement mechanisms.
We're wired to always focus on what is missing; what we don't have. So our high-minded idealistic selves will always push back reflexively against whatever regime of habits we're currently administering. If you work long hours, the ideal becomes to have more fun; if your life is mostly leisure, you aspire to "get it together". This constant antagonism with the self creates the illusion that we must change, when in reality we are changing daily, whether we mean to or not, and despite our habits. The will is far weaker, and our prefrontal cortex likes to generate grandiose visions of who we are and could be. The truth is that all of these factors are duking it out inside of us, and who we ultimately become reflects the outcome of this struggle.
Astute as always, Tamara. Reading you is one habit I have no desire to change.
Habits don’t only encode what we want. They also carry what was there when we were too young to want otherwise. Bourdieu’s point is that dispositions get laid down by class before the will even enters the room, so reading them as pure desire flatters them. The kid who never had books didn’t want less to read.
You’re right about the see-saw, where whatever you have becomes the thing to flee. Still, I’d not crown the brawl’s winner as the self. Sometimes the loudest faction wins, not the truest.
Thank you for your provocative and fascinating comments, Andrew!
I really love where you’ve taken this. It opens up a whole new avenue for me, and I think I’ll see myself a little differently now. Perhaps our behaviour is a kind of mirror, sometimes more honest than the story we tell ourselves about who we are. Thank you for adding this layer.
Thanks! Glad it resonated with you.
Monod said, "Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is we will do nothing." It's that stuck place, whether out of habit or fear or desire, that does us in, and, by extension, stymies and may even destroy others.
He earned that line, he spent a war in the Résistance watching which neighbours did the small things and which found reasons not to. The person frozen at their own threshold usually stands in a doorway someone else needed to walk through. Not doing nothing is a strange verb to have to conjugate, but here we are.
Grateful you brought Monod here, he belongs to this essay, Andi.
I have memorized few "live by" quotations, but that one has stayed with me since I was a 19-year-old college student. My mom sent it to me, in a letter. She was replying to my sorry-for-myself complaint that I'd not been selected for a job I really wanted and was oh-so-close to getting. Clearly, I had some small things to attend to.
A cross-stitch platitude would’ve been the easy send but your mother picked the biologist who parses inaction into two failures and hands you the sharper one. And she was right about the small things. I love that she knew that a quote arrives differently on paper.
That conjugation has some dexterity: not doing nothing about nothing makes it a "nothing burgher" with nothing on it, for everybody, like "the science" being deployed during Covid, doing nothing to prove it, the virus, actually existed and nothing to verify they were "safe and effective" that was made into restrictive nothing burghers many millions had to swallow with nothing on them, lettuce, catsup, mayo, i.e. meaningless protocols: quarantines, masks , distances, et cetera, based on the habit of a certified hierarchy of authority gone rogue.
The pun’s got some spring to it, the nothing burgher served to everyone with nothing on it, I’ll give you that, Michael!! But I’d slow down on the leap from “authorities made mistakes” to “the thing itself was nothing”. Institutions can absolutely go rogue and turn into habit, that’s my essay’s worry about certified hierarchies. But error in the response isn’t proof of absence in the cause. A rogue authority can still be reacting to something real, just badly. Two separate ledgers. Thank you for the wordplay!
You move from habit to fear to desire, each obstacle harder to name than the last, which mimics the psychic labor it describes.
Cybernetics has a term for your "churning that never stops" — homeostasis, a system's tendency to resist change by absorbing disruption as new normal. Modernity didn't remove the barriers to change, it became a self-correcting system that metabolizes rebellion into content, feedback, another day. The stillness is the system succeeding at its actual job.
Tamara, your voice is stronger than ever.
The word hides cruelty inside homeostasis… the system doesn't fight you, it welcomes you. Every thermostat is polite. You push, it adjusts, it thanks you, nothing moves. But a thermostat has no unconscious, it runs on a set point someone else chose. Desire is the one signal it can't absorb because it was never trying to be legible in the first place. That's what Lacan is doing there, adding a variable the loop can't read.
Clara, thank you for bringing the engineering diagram to my philosophical rambling!
Tamara, we mistake “rehearsal” for readiness. I spent a year "preparing" to quit a job, yeah, journaling, planning, imagining, you name it. The prep itself became the treacle. I only moved when I stopped narrating the leap and just missed a deadline on purpose, forcing the door shut behind me.
We let contemplation impersonate courage. Beautifully argued essay. The art moved me to tears.
The self-sabotage-as-liberation move is more cunning than it looks. You couldn’t leap forward, so you demolished the ground behind you, which tricks your own risk-aversion into serving you. Odysseus at the mast, only reversed to force action instead of resisting it. The journaling year wasn’t wasted, but you’re right, it became a place to live rather than a road out. Effort disguises stall beautifully.
Thank you for telling me about the art, Céline! It means a lot to me.
Tamara, the paintings chosen here are the smartest part of the essay, maybe smarter than the essay knows.
The Piranesi is habit because it isn't a trap in the gothic sense,,nobody's chained to that staircase but the man in the foreground, and even he could walk up it. The horror is that the stairs “function”. They carry weight, they lead somewhere plausible, and they still arrive nowhere. That's habitus, not a wall, a mechanism that keeps producing motion without displacement. De Nomé earns his place doubly, the picture is the one irreversible instant (masonry doesn't un-fall), and the painter himself was the fear made biographical: an outsider so marginal that his most famous canvas spent centuries wrongly titled, misread as spectacle. And Dossi illustrates the “result” of correctly identified desire, men getting their faces back. That's the only one of the three images that shows completion rather than paralysis or rupture, which tracks: reform and revolution are processes, but self-recognition is closer to an event.
There's a fourth mode sitting between Montaigne's reform and the revolutionary's clean break, the reversible intervention. It's the principle behind how damaged paintings get restored. The rule is that new paint must sit only on the loss, must be made of different, identifiable material than the original (visible under UV, sometimes even up close), and must be removable without harming what's underneath. The object changes. The change is real, visible in ordinary light. But it's built to confess itself as an addition, and to be undone by whoever comes after with better judgment or better information.
That's a third way to hold your own life that isn't gentler habit-work and isn't Montaigne's oysters, but isn't the irreversible break either. Make the change, but make it in a material that admits it's a change, legible, dated, not disguised as having always been there, and not staked on being permanent. It's less romantic than the break Lacan's desire demands. But it's honest about the fact that most of us don't get one clean gesture. We get successive campaigns of revision, each one a considered guess by someone who knew less than the next version of us will. The dignity is in refusing to paint over the seam.
What a masterpiece this essay is!
The reversible intervention belongs in the essay. Conservation ethics as ethics, full stop! Cesare Brandi built a theory of restoration on refusing to fake the lost passages, filling losses with hatched neutral tone that never pretends to be the master’s hand. You’ve lift it off the panel and onto the self, and it holds. Make the change in honest material, dated, legible, undoable by whoever comes after with better light.
Thank you for the fourth way and for reading the pictures harder than I dared to! Fabulous!
“Go up a flight of stairs. Cross the road to say “hello” to a friend. But something stops us. Our limbs have seized up, nearly paralyzed, moving as though through treacle. The goal that was so plainly within reach turns unreachable. It slips away. It’s gone. And we wake up. But in our waking lives, don’t we feel much the same thing?”
Yes, I think we’ve all had this experience, in both dream and awake states, but part of the problem must surely be mistaking the efficacy of the desired goal with the certainty of knowing the right steps to reach, achieve, that goal. I like what Andrew said: “One of the mistakes we make is convincing ourselves that who we are is who we think we are.” I’d only say, “But best we find out!”
This may be too simplistic, but let’s say I want to write a book of fiction, a novel. I can see it, feel it, taste it—it’s a living thing for me. But I don’t know if I have the ability and skills to actually write the book. But there’s a time-honored way to find out—study and practice creative writing. Read the masters. Get the fundamentals of grammar, sentence structure and vocabulary down. Learn fiction’s language—the plot, the theme, the characters, dialog, and intermixing the arc (the pacing, the tone, the purpose) of all of them.
I get halfway through the learning and realize: this is too damn hard. This is more than dexterity with words, more than skill. It is art, or meant to be, it is subjective, it is far, far more than I originally thought it was. And oh btw, who will buy this book? Wait! Who will even publish it? And on and on…before the paralysis comes the doubts.
And then we hear people say, “If I’d have known how crazy hard it was to write a novel, I might never have begun.”
What’s the difference? One might say ‘Courage!’; another might say ‘Carelessness!’; our families might say, ‘Crazy as a loon!’
But our best friend or maybe a couple friends, or even a total stranger who reads us on the interwebs, might say, “Just do it! Learn as you go. Don’t give up your day job, but don’t give up your dreams, either!”
Uhhhhmmm…go back to the part about ‘don’t give up your day job.’
Well, unless you are wealthy or have a patron or a spouse who will support you while you pursue this wild ducks scenario (let’s say for the sake of the story that you do not have or are any of these) …you should keep your day job so you can eat, have a roof over your head, buy paper, and a laptop and pens and books!”
And if the answer to that is: “But if I can’t give everything—my soul, my heart, all my time, my best thinking—all of it to my novel, then I can’t write it,” okay fine. Then just keep your day job. Forget the novel.
You see, your “best thinking” got you to this point, except you aren’t really willing to forgo the inconvenience of having to be a self-sustaining adult. Bummer. Before the full attempt comes the dawn!
Look, we can’t all be a full-tilt boogie Dostoevsky suggesting the plot of his new novel involves a sick, tired, old man with no prospects to a kind-hearted stenographer named Anna who thinks the novel is a great idea and oh, btw, I’ll marry you, keep you organized and keep us solvent, too, thing.
Part of me want to say, “Oh, I get it,” and the other part wants to say “Just do it and shut up about it, or, see you after you get home from work!”
The End.
PS Love the artwork with this wonderful essay!
This is a whole one-act play in a comment, T, and I love that you let it argue with itself!
The romantic myth says the novel demands all of you or nothing. Soul, heart, best thinking, the works. And you’ve spotted the con inside that demand. It’s often not a permission slip to never start. If it has to be everything, then the day job becomes a noble excuse, and you get to keep the dream pristine by never testing it against a blank page. Clean hands. Untouched vision. No rejection letters, because no manuscript. I know this too well… how many times I’ve used the same excuses!
But the day job isn’t the enemy of the novel. Constraint is where most of the good ones got written. Trollope did his 3 hours before dawn then went and ran the postal service, invented the pillar box while he was at it. Kafka had the insurance office. Stevens sold insurance too and wrote some of the century’s strangest poems on the walk to work. The unlimited time you think you need would probably sink you because nothing focuses a sentence like knowing you’ve got 40 minutes before the commute and that’s all you get.
Dostoevsky wrote “The Gambler” in about a month, under a contract so predatory he’d have lost the rights to everything if he missed the deadline. Anna Snitkina, the stenographer, wasn’t the reward for genius but the logistics that made the genius survivable. Every artist you envy for their freedom had an Anna, or a pension, or a postal salary, or a wife whose own book never got written. The freedom is nearly always somebody else’s labour, uncredited….
So find out! That’s the only line I’d underline in your whole monologue. You don’t discover whether the novel’s in you by quitting everything and staring at the ceiling with all that ruinous free time. You find out at the edges of a working life, in the stolen hour, badly at first. The book that gets written around a job is worth more than the masterpiece protected from ever existing. This is a sort of note to myself.
Thank you for the play, and for loving the art. I put a lot of thinking and time in order to choose the best art to illustrate my essays!
P.S. Piranesi would have appreciated a comment that climbs its own staircase and cheerfully arrives back where it started.
Tamara: "Clean hands. Untouched vision. No rejection letters, because no manuscript. I know this too well… how many times I’ve used the same excuses!"
Me too, T., me too. Until the day I didn't. But there is such a thing as being unready, unprepared, when opportunity knocks...I know that one, too. But, then, eventually, if it's to be...and for me, it was. To think I recuperated and regrouped from once being unready when the big chance came...makes me nervous to recall. Another story, another time!/t
The unready-when-it-knocked story is the one you skipped past, and I notice you did it with a shiver. Worth honouring why that memory frightens more than the years of excuses do. The excuses were safe, no verdict ever came, but being unready when the real chance arrived, is the one time the door actually opened and you saw yourself not walk through. That’s a near miss that haunts because it was so close to going the other way. Glad you regrouped after. Tell that story sometime, T!
This strikes me is a couple of different ways. The first is your statement that, "Everything is forever in motion." I hadn't thought of that as making it harder to make a big change in life, but now it's out there and I'm thinking about it. It reminds me of being on the playground when I was young, and jumping rope. Most of us could do it fairly easily, but when a second rope was added and you were jumping two ropes at once, it became much more difficult. Things in life are constantly changing, and some changes are easily absorbed or ignored, while others cause quite the disturbance. It makes me want to pay close attention to what happens inside me when things change, and how do my own actions change or not when things happen.
Habits as something that prevents change makes sense. We are comfortable, things work the way we want or the way we're used to, and we want it to stay that way. I'll admit that looking at my habits and where I felt they were taking me was the major reason for making a change last year, and leaving everything (mostly) behind. I'd made a move post-pandemic with an intention that didn't play out the way I'd hoped. Finding Museguided and our subsequent conversations helped me to wake up to the very dangerous direction I was headed, and I dropped or sold everything and left.
Fear is something with which I'm very familiar, and I feel like I've become intimate with its many forms. For me, the most insidious fear is the fear that I might be kidding myself, and getting it wrong. That came up the other day, because I've been here now for several months, and I've tried to firm up plans to stay longer. Part of that is practical, part is what I think I need to do now. But I keep getting blocked or held up in those plans, and find myself instead of letting go and moving on to another plan, fighting to stick with this one. And I question that. There's a part of me that questions why I'm fighting, am I looking for easy and think I've found it? Or do I really think this is where I need to be right now?
I question in at least in part because I've worked with teachers who have said to follow the flow of the river (in life), and it's made sense to me. Still, despite their teaching, I find myself trying to reach the riverbank and stop for at least a while. And I wonder if I'm afraid of going or afraid of staying?
It kind of ties in with your final point about searching for yourself, then staying faithful to what you find. With all the moving parts forever in motion, sometimes it's hard to see.
Sure, follow the river! But the double rope isn’t a river. A river has one current. What you describe is being asked to read two turning ropes at once, and the reason it’s hard is that there’s no single flow to find. Two ropes, two rhythms, and only one of you.
On the afraid-of-going-or-staying question, I don’t think you have to solve it in that form, because it might be a false pair. The river teaching assumes movement is truer than stillness. But sometimes the fight to stay on the bank is the current, and letting go and drifting on is the easy thing. Getting held up over and over on the plans to stay could be résistance. It could also just be the world being the world, visas and money and logistics, and you reading tea leaves in what’s only friction. I honestly can’t tell you which from here. But I’d notice that you called the fear of kidding yourself the most insidious one. It only ever accuses you of wanting the easy thing. It never once considers that staying might be the hard thing and you’ve earned it.
Thank you for telling me that, Doc! Watch the ropes, not the river.
Beautiful, if heartbreaking. And this is why I do initiation work. An ancient technology whose original recipe none of us can know for certain and yet whose chthonic, life-death-life promise is the forever blueprint. Because change is both an incredibly human and inhumanly difficult feat. I have found, through being guided in and guiding others through a very specific yet wholly bespoke-for-each-person ritual death and rebirth process, something becomes available that was before out of reach. What I love about it so much isn’t that suddenly everything aligns and the sky opens and pours all our dearest dreams onto us, or that we suddenly become who we most believe ourselves to be, deep down. It’s not even that it helps us face our fears of change or that it helps us be in conversation, not opposition, with the motion (though it very much does help with these two great challenges you name). It’s more that, through initiation, I have come to know myself and how it is I uniquely belong beyond and beneath everything I choose to do or that happens to me. And from that place, I am able to be fully here, more alive, a little more of myself a little more of the time. Less glamorous, perhaps, than the dramatic change most spend whole lives seeking, yet far closer to the deeper longing to belong and to come fully alive that I believe we all crave.
As one of my most beloved mentors says about initiation work ~ it’s not going to suddenly make life easier, to change, to be initiated into your gifts, to say yes to change… in fact, it’s actually more likely to bring more trouble to your door, at least at first. But it is going to make life more exciting, more your own, more ensouled… more alive.
Initiation differs from therapy, personal development and many other kinds of attempts at personal change because it presents us with and helps us navigate an irreversible threshold crossing. This always begins with naming what is ending. What I have found, guiding hundreds of women, is that this death-without-dying is the most often missing element behind why people cannot take that next step you speak of here. The reason we cannot bear the fear change brings up, amidst the endless motion, is precisely that we never slow down long enough to really, really be with what exactly is ending which is bringing on the change. And then, to grieve that ending. To bury the dead. To sacrifice the precious old way and watch it burn to utter ash in the fire, with love. With gratitude. We have to grieve the ritual wash! Lament the disappearance of toast! It's truly that painstaking...
Only then can the next step be taken. And the next and the next. And this will always bring up that third obstacle you named. Initiation helps us face the either-or inner war and step into the terrifying but liberating reality of both-and. Still, we will have to kill some desires to say yes to others. Then, we find out there is no right or wrong. But there is the need to give a good death to things in order to truly live.
You might say the culture has become so obsessed with Life, life ,life, life (read: endless productivity and motion), it has come to fear all kinds of death. Death, when taken out of the equation, creates a kind of living hell of endless motion without the true movement we wish. Initiation restores this. Initiation restores Death to its rightful throne.
It's extemely challenging for me to take things step by step and to pause. I, too, live here amongst us. Interestingly, in my efforts to get better at just the next best step, I have decided to pause-- to stop the never-ending motion-- on one thing in my life. And I already feel my ability to move in the ways I most long to move opening up!
Cheers to the next best step. The next threshold crossing, and all it’s known and unforeseen initiatory invitations. It’s really all any of us have.
To be honest, I am extremely grateful for your comment, Ama, since you’ve restored the missing middle term that my essay was missing. I am talking about… grief. I moved from habit to fear to desire and skipped what’s beneath all three: nothing new gets built on ground you haven’t first buried the old thing in. I treat the ritual wash and the toast as enemies of change. You’ve caught that they are also the dead requiring burial, and you don’t get to skip the funeral. That’s the correction I will keep. Thank you for that!
The point about a culture phobic of death producing motion-without-movement is the mechanism, you said it so much better than me. Endless Life, capital L, refusing every small death, is how you end up churning in place. You can’t cross a threshold you won’t let the old self die at. I couldn’t really see it without you here. Initiation restoring Death to its throne, impressive! Thank you for insisting we grieve the toast. I meant it half as a joke and you’ve shown me it was actually essential. Thank you again!
It’s the best damn joke ever, and between the two of us, I do believe we have a dirge to sing some life back into the changes we most long for! I’m deeply honored to have inspired you… I hope to someday be in-person in a salon discussion of epic proportions!! I have a whole class on giving a good death… even to toast… and for the record, I still try to skip the funeral alllllll the time because, as you point out, old habits die hard. But maybe, just maybe, it’s not the “hard” part we’re so trained to focus on in that truth, but the “die” part that longs for our utmost attention. ;) I love our brains.
Yes, we are drilled to hear “die hard” as a complaint about difficulty when the verb carrying all that work is die. The habit’s stubbornness is the thing asking to be mourned properly. A salon with you in the room would be marvellous!! Consider the invitation extended.
So good to read you again. 🤍
What stayed with me was the paradox of being surrounded by constant motion and still feeling unable to make the one change that actually belongs to us. We can become so practiced at adapting that adaptation itself starts to look like growth.
Maybe that’s the harder question underneath all of this: not can I change? but which change would bring me closer to myself rather than simply make me easier for the world to use?
There’s adaptation that fits you to the world, and there’s the one that fits the world a little more to you. The first is what employers mean by flexible, and it hollows you out, one accommodation at a time. Your question is really asking how to tell real growth from pliability, and I think the tell is direction of travel. Pliability always bends toward what’s convenient for others. The change worth making usually costs someone your compliance. Thank you for coming back to read!
I love your idea that it’s not change for the sake of change, but the courage to stop betraying your own desire. I’ve changed my life completely, and it was very much what I wanted. But some parts of that change turned out to be deeply painful. There were losses I couldn’t have anticipated, and life took a turn I could never have prepared for. You can plan for a big change, but you can’t really prepare for the “black swan” moment, the unforeseen thing that suddenly changes the whole landscape.
I’m still rebuilding, but I would make the leap again. Perhaps that’s the nature of real change: it asks for a huge amount of risk, because there is no way of knowing where you’ll land.
The black swan exposes a lie inside how we usually talk about brave choices. We say “I’d do it again” as if that settles the ledger, but notice that it can only refuse to let losses be the whole story. You say the leap was yours, and the black swan wasn’t a verdict on it. Taleb’s whole point was that the unforeseeable can’t be planned into, only built to withstand. You survive the swan by being the person who rebuilds. Which you’re doing. Thank you for the honesty about the losses, few people admit that leap!
Thank you. I think there’s something very humbling about not knowing exactly where a choice will take you. You make the best decision you can with what you know at the time, and then you keep moving, adapting and discovering what comes next. Maybe that’s part of the adventure too.
I see it the same way.
The calculus is just too demanding. Change begs for projection; it shouts Out! It requires space, some distance between our nose and our unknown. Comfort favors expectation. It reigns in the mirror where our nose knows what it sees. So the math gets tangled. The further out our desire projects us, the greater unpredictability increases its proportional weight. Expectations erode under this compounding complexity. Comfort detests the test. Change tastes the tease. The tension of this building uncertainty challenges the whole enterprise. Dis-ease develops. Desire pushes, while indecision pulls. We have one foot on the gas, one on the brake. Wheels spin. A weak, but chronic anxiety settles in the body. Every step confirms one bias or the other and the body shakes and cracks under competing pressures. We cannot know the outcome of a decision before it plays out and the ease of the modern world makes that fact feel really disagreeable to us. In a crusade, or a gold rush, or a ten-year plan to send men to the moon the desire and the expectation line up and march in rhythm. In a world where a job pays the bills, and norms fit the bill, desires and expectations play off each other. But in a world where any and every dream is "possible" none can find the right sine/cosine to hold the angles. The structure collapses. When Cupid's arrows fly at Gatling Gun speed, the heart explodes in exhaustion. Tread carefully. Walk slowly. Follow the path as nimbly as your courage allows you. Let the joys that emerge confirm its bias into the next step. None of it is easy. That's all I know for sure.
Uncertainty scales with distance, the further out desire flings you, the wider the cone of possible outcomes, and the body reads that widening as threat. Prediction error is metabolically expensive. The organism would rather be reliably bored than expensively surprised.
Acute fear you can discharge, you run or you fight and it’s over. But the foot-on-both-pedals state has no discharge, so it just idles in the tissue, low and constant, wearing the engine down without ever crashing the car, a hum that never shuts off.
Let the joys that emerge confirm the bias into the next step. You take a step and see whether gladness follows, and you let that be the only instrument you trust. The moon-shot had its desire and expectation marching in lockstep, sure, but nobody gets a countdown for their own life, using pleasure as a compass needle. It’s slower. It might be the only honest method there is.
Thank you for thinking in waveforms, Andrew!
Scary how to make a leap can be especially when plunging myself into something new in search for a deeper meaning to my life and a solid structure of identity. Anyways as I grow older I just learn to risk it all and prepare myself for the consequences whatever they may be. This is beautiful T. Will have to reread again for deeper digestion.
The bracing part is a bit of a trick. You prepare for consequences and then the ones that actually show up are never the ones you rehearsed. You packed a coat, turns out the problem was your shoes. And people who leap better later on, I don’t think it’s courage exactly. They’ve just quit expecting the landing to owe them anything.
Thank you for saying you’ll come back to it, Karl, that’s the nicest thing a reader can promise!
strangely, when i had my great epiphany a few years back and started to feel again, and to write, my first landing was on the idea that we have to be happy to feel our desire at all, but do not have to lean in to wishing for it's outcome. that was a kind of relief to me then, soon to be furiously understood to be a lie that society gave me, the lie in order to stay stuck in my position, to not use my desire as a guiding star to where it might show itself where i need to go, preventing change and making stability and solidity the greater goals. i was content to just be able to have contact to it, my inner wishes, and thought the greatest achievement of sovereignty over self and it's lower impulses is to keep desire in check, just to observe it without acting on it.
my fury now is mostly about this lie and my certainty of it to be the best to obey it, loosing so much time, chances, lovely people's patience and mine. i cherish my desires now and take them to be my compass to find directions on my path. i find my moods more reliable as guides then my responsible thoughts. its chaotic, i admit. but there's far more intelligence in it, no more praying to order and constance in a prudent life: the offering of self on the altar of boredom, the cruelest of gods.
Non-attachment was meant to free you from craving that enslaves, and what you received was non-attachment used to keep you from wanting your way out. Same technique, opposite master. Authentic equanimity makes you more able to act rightly. Your moods as compass, chaotic but intelligent, though the compass swings. Desire points, but not every reading is true north. Trust it, verify it against the wreckage. Thank you for the altar of boredom, the cruellest god, Ivy! That phrase is going to haunt me.
wonderful how you read me, to hand me back a more precise reading of what i just crudely drew, in between reading your essay and the next task, to allow my own understanding to fully form around my sketch. thank you for filling in colour and more decisive lines. precision really is one of your most defined talents, among a cohort of them of course.
i love how you never just through back the ball of yarn (that in itself is an additional gift to your writing), but to add a few more rounds to even out the curve, to fill it in a little more where needed, and throw it back more complete!
You’re a poet, Ivy, the yarn-ball image is generous, and I’ll confess the method behind it: I think a reply’s job is to hand your thought back having grown a little in the passing. You did the throwing. I just refuse to catch without adding a round. it happens that we are on the same page.
… which is so very wonderful and truly appreciated, if not wholeheartedly loved!
There’s a great deal to parse out and ruminate over, here.
I’m reading two phenomena happening in tandem: a social implication, and an individual, subjective implication, and I’m getting the sense that they’re sort of both linked. I would actually caution against that, because you always have a sort of post hoc causality hazard, and it could be that both what’s happening socially (again, depending on where you are) and personally, have a common root.
Obviously, in the cases where the church or the monarchy ruled by fiat and decree, there had yet to be evolution or development of the hazards of individuals. In fact, it may have come to pass that by abandoning monarchy and feudalism, we may have simply displaced the danger and not detected the full breadth of it yet. At least when you knew the duchy wanted their taxes or the church wanted its tithe, you knew where the fangs were coming from.
It’s sort of hard for me to sympathize with many of such examples except by a sort of natural human empathy type of understanding, so I really don’t have so much to say about it that hasn’t been O, so eruditely lain out already.
But I actually believe - in theory, at least - that liberalization of everyone may not have been a good idea (in fact, I guarantee it). Individuality requires hoisting of burdens you normally have others help out with. Those without the requisite constitution to be their own ass of burden are prone to follies and foibles. Particularly if they’re not used to an easy sense of direction.
Therefore, I think many goals are out of reach simply because they are designed that way; they are not goals at all. They are illusions. And it’s easy to castigate yourself and give yourself a reason to quit if you chase after illusions in the first place. Or worse: some don’t even know the difference.
It certainly doesn’t help that there is a concentrated effort to foment fear amongst people who don’t know any better by other people who don’t care. That’s another problem of the dissolution of community: people are not ingrained or inculcated with the sense of responsibility to neighbour, primarily because one now often does not need to see his neighbour at all.
Now, I sort of live like that, so I know a thing or two, and I can say that it’s easy to fret over all the examples one can behold, particularly curated as they are in a sort of natural selection that winds up getting broadcast on the internet. Really, I think examples abound of people who, more or less, accomplish reasonable goals. It’s just you’re not going to see a lot of traffic on a story like that. Nothing salacious. Not enough scandal.
I also think another trivium worth keeping in mind is the intense population growth in the last century. At the turn (1900), there were only between one and two billion people. A century later, there were seven and a half billion. That’s a more than sevenfold increase of global population against a backdrop of cultures that had, more or less, been in their then-present state for thousands, if not tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands in some cases, of years. All the institutions were bound to crumble. It’s a shock.
Your caution about post hoc causality is a methodologically sober note. The social loosening and the individual paralysis may indeed be co-symptoms rather than cause-and-effect, twin efflorescences of some deeper substratal shift, and the candidate you gesture toward, sheer demographic inundation, is more explanatory than it first appears. Institutions are not abstractions floating above us but ratios, densities, thickenings of repeated human contact, and when you septuple the denominator inside a single century you dissolve the very intimacy-conditions that let the old forms cohere in the first place. A village of 200 absorbs deviance; a megalopolis of 20 million can only surveil it.
Then, I don’t think the problem is that too many were handed a freedom their constitution couldn’t bear, which slides too easily toward a rather chilly sortation of the fit from the unfit. I think the problem is subtler and sadder… we distributed the burden of self-authorship universally while withdrawing, simultaneously, every frame that once made it survivable, the guild, the parish, the extended kin-web, the shared eschatology. Freedom without infrastructure is abandonment. The feudal subject at least knew the vector of the fangs, as you so vividly put it, whereas the modern one is bitten from everywhere and nowhere and told the toothmarks are self-inflicted.
The cruelty is hat the phantasm-chasing is now monetised upstream by parties who profit from the perpetual not-arriving. The carrot is not simply out of reach, someone is selling tickets to the reaching. How funny! How sad! At the same time.
Anyway, dear Ian, thank you for the demographic long-view! Few people think in population curves, and fewer still connect the raw arithmetic of bodies to the felt texture of institutional collapse. But expected from you :)
That’s more or less the gist: the infrastructure that would have made supporting individualism within the social context tenable collapsed under the weight of sheer influx.
Now, whether a sort of communal compassion was part of that infrastructure, or has simply become a casualty of impetuosity and developmental vicissitudes is the part I can’t really assign conclusively. I couldn’t even begin to speculate. It’s certainly conceivable that there’s an individual volition to help, but it’s daunting when very few individuals want to participate. It coalesces into an enormous collective action problem, which is the state we find ourselves in currently.
Actually, the perpetual not-arriving was more or less what I was implying by stating goals as convenient illusions. What I didn’t mention were the opportunists abetting the behaviour for their own ends, and I’m glad you brought that up.
Con art and exploitation have been around since the dawn of both mutual awareness and commodity surplus. But in the absence of a central moral vanguard, it threatens to become a cottage industry. So not only do you have the ready-prep demographic of confused, directionless people (serfs in a former age); you have those who sell them fraudulent treasure maps as a way of asserting their own individual will in an individual age.
I’m careful about the associations between institutions and individual will since I admit to a prejudice of being leery about it, but it’s a plausible explanation. I thank you for entertaining it. 🌷
The collective action problem names why individual goodwill keeps evaporating: compassion has a coordination threshold, below which each willing person looks around, sees no one moving, and rationally holds back. It isn’t that the volition died. It’s stranded, each helper waiting for a quorum that never assembles. As for the fraudulent treasure maps becoming a cottage industry, that’s the grim genius of it… the disorientation and the cure for the disorientation are sold by the same hand. Thank you, Ian!
Bien sûr! De rien, madame. ☺️🌸
What if the self in this "uni-context" world has become so unwieldy to manoeuvre because the goal posts for our local parameters for change have gone global, so the options are overwhelming to even contemplate let alone to ever enact?
Add the sense of collective humanity being on the verge of a change of epoch, aka an Aquarian Age being ushered in, as I type this now over the internet, with the profound awareness of good and evil, held in my very hands, as we all are conscious of the change we need from the nihilistic course we are on.
Who am I, what to do, how to be, I feel needs a vantage point Moss points out so well: we need to see ourselves through the POV of our death. In the way of Lacan, at its deepest, the Otherworld, where I can see for myself life, after life, "dying before I die". It sounds impractical, and that's why the loop keeps looping, on the Monday to Friday stairs leading nowhere.
But as our idols in full force on the capitalist loom of overkill are being broken under the sheer weight of their resource depleting maintenance, and as Circe here at this transformative "heyiya" moment with the wand of "disenchantment", together makes sense of choice now as an imaginal act of reinhabiting our lives nakedly, as Inanna descends into the underworld, and the real becomes the dream it has always been.
Awesomely prodigious of you to take on this theme Tamara, it lands in my life like the watershed I'm living on, and can only now fathom the full ramifications of the complex interweave of factors involved in this Gaian world of ours, to encounter going forward, just to be!
When the reference group for your one life becomes every life visible through the screen, the comparison set is infinite, and an infinite comparison set is functionally a paralysing one. Kierkegaard saw the shape of this before the internet handed it a delivery system. He called dread the dizziness of freedom, the vertigo you feel looking down into your own possibility. More possibility, more dizziness. We built a machine that maximises the looking-down. Of course the legs lock.
The Stoics drilled it daily, memento mori, as a lens that sorts the trivial from the essential fast. Heidegger made being-toward-death the one thing that individuates you out of the anonymous crowd, the “they” that lives your life for you until you remember it ends. So “dying before you die” is the only altitude from which you can see they are circular.
Then every generation has believed itself standing exactly at the hinge of history, and that conviction is itself a kind of comfort because a watershed absolves you. If the age is turning anyway, the pressure’s off the single frightened person deciding whether to move on a Tuesday. Circe’s wand disenchants, yes, and I’d let it disenchant the epoch story a little too. The change still has to be enacted by one set of hands, yours, at ordinary human scale, on no cosmic schedule. Inanna hangs on the hook in the underworld for three days and nobody ushers her down but her own choosing.
Thank you for bringing the whole pantheon to the doorstep, Michael!