25 May 2017, 7:27pm
I was woken up by someone arriving at the house this morning, more specifically by the dogs, pulled out mid dream so was pretty groggy. I jumped up to see who it was pulling up in their car but I couldn't tell and raced to put some clothes on. I was out in the hallway pulling on my boots when I thought that it could be the meter reader and waited in the gloom until I heard the meter box open, so I rolled back into bed with my clothes on and checked the time, it was around 9am which is later than I'm up usually, but I didn't go to bed till 3am-ish. The person who checked the energy meter drove off and I layed in bed for a little longer before getting up for a cup of tea.
The only thing I did today besides the usual was tiding up the kitchen I'd say it's about 50% done, I'll try do the rest of it tomorrow. No walk but I ate alright. I have been having rolled oats for the first meal of the day and that has kept me satisfied pretty well, butter chicken for lunch and a chunky canned soup for dinner. It has been a concern of mine for the last few months that I havn't been eating as healthy or as often as I should.
Journaling I feel has made it easier to keep better tabs on the things I'm thinking about, sort of like putting a bookmark in for the next day and it's helping with forming more complete explanations and arguments about them.
I found myself pondering on a couple of things today, and I think I'm getting a better picture about my struggle with motivation. Firstly I'm coming to recognise that it's a bit more complex than just lacking motivation, and I have thought previously that it is a bit of a simplification. It's been hard for me to really get into the subtleties and nuance that make up my unique experiences around it ansd understand them, but I think if I keep trying little by little, I might get there eventually.
I can identify two general states that I spend alot of my time in so far. One, and probably the one I would call 'normal' for me, is captured by days like today and yesterday where I would say in general I lack orientation. That isn't to say that there aren't things I'd like to accomplish but that there isn't strong motivation to get them done and not a whole lot of pressure to do so. Despite that I will usually plug away at something if the mood strikes me. I am also likely to engage in novelty seeking behavior. The other state is one where I begin to ask questions like, "Where is my motivation?", etc. And is where I am feeling the pressure because I'm not keeping up or I didn't do something that I needed to do and seemingly lack the motivation to do it still. It is easy to say I lack motivation and then cry why, but behind the simplification there seems to be deeper reasons why I act the way I do. For instance in the second state I can feel an amplified sense of resistance that I think may be present at a less noticable level in the first. Where does this resistance come from? I dont know yet.
One question that dealing with any sort of 'lack of motivation' prompts is one about control. Do I have as much control over myself as I'd like to believe I do? I might try a simple exercise to determine this, I stick out my hand, now I raise it upward, now I decide to lower it again. I can't see why I shouldn't conclude that it was I who was in control there. So it confuses things when I can't do something seemingly simple as getting out of bed in the morning. If I pay close attention I may notice that there is a sense of hesitation when I try again. Where did that come from? I thought I knew myself before I tried to get out of bed that morning.
If I define myself as that which I have control over(body, mind, etc.), then this development is near irreconcilable what am I to conclude? If I'm honest then I can only conclude that that definition doesn't describe the truth. What definition of myself is closer to the truth? Who am I? With these questions in mind I might try the exercise from earlier. I stick out my hand, this time I decide to lower my hand first, now I decide to raise it. Was I in control? Wait, was it really me who decided to lower my hand? After all I don't recall deciding against moving my hand in any of the other directions. Was it as if by impulse? Perhaps there is more to me than I currently realise. How do I reconcile this, do I try to expand the definition of myself to include these anomalies, where do I draw the line? is everything me? or am I nothing? Is there any way to ever know?
It's a bit mind bending to think that how I define myself may be a matter of perspective. It's hard to think that I have control over the decisions I make when viewed from a systems perspective and the best I can describe the sense of myself at this perspective is as swirling energy of cause and effect, but this sense is not mature and hard to conceptualise, and may not represent the truth any better than that individual sense of me. Yet here I am also typing away at the keyboard, living this life, trying to find answers to questions that matter to me on a personal level. As I was thinking about this today I felt energised by the thought that I can exist on both levels that I can still attempt to change my life, and also be the happening where the sense of me is just a part. I suspect that some of the 'troubles' that I've had with motivation is because I've been trying to be something that I'm not, at least maybe not yet. I'm thinking that while I have been chasing some sort of awakening to solve or trancend my problems I've been denying that I'm still very human and an ignorant one at that,and that practical solutions to my issues are of just as much worth seeking out.
Reply With Quote
Did some more washing, but still have to finish cleaning the kitchen.
This is a false dichotomy but helps to give an idea of what sort of 'problems' we are dealing with. Self-inquiry describes a process of questioning(your brain is forced to condider the question), revolving around the things we attach to ourselves, to produce insight about those things. It's possible, like I did, to get hung up on the whole insight part. If I have it right, there is nothing tinky-woo about the nature of insight, because self-inquiry is just like regular inquiry/problem solving/thinking about stuff. It's easy to get caught up in assuming that insight is appearing out of thin air or from some other dimension, I think, because of our black-box like nature, which is just like saying that we don't in general have the ability to peek under the covers of our own existence to see all of the spectacular biological machinery at work. But that is okay because we have the ability to ask for information or for a problem to be solved by those inaccessable parts of ourselves and have it return into our conciousness as if by magic! 1 + 1 = ?
Bookmarks