Log28: Revisions to the Drafts of Life

" 'Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.  Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

...

It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

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If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important--if you want to operate on your default setting--then you, like me, probably will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.  It will actually within your power to experienced a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars--compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

That is real freedom."

-excerpts from speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2006.*

*These excerpts by no means do the speech justice.  If you have not read it yet, please do so here.  It seems long, but goes by quickly and is well-worth your time.

The great freedom is that we can choose what we think about each day, we can entertain more than one way to interpret a situation, we can escape our subjective snow-globe kingdoms and become part of the world, and be in it.  If we have little choice over anything else, that which exists within us is that which we can control.

Of course, like DFW says, it's so hard.  And it takes incredible effort.

I have realized that I have taken for granted my default setting, and have been on cruise control becoming so absorbed by the lone reality that has been mine.  This is of course the universe in which I leave, and without myself I would have no such universe.  But to assume it to the extent that I have in some ways been denying myself the chance to make and find the beautiful connections that can be made here is unfortunate.

So I can change.  And it begins with thought.  It begins with what I choose to think about.  And how I choose to think.

If I have agency over nothing else, that I do have.