Monday 20 March 2006

futures ineffectualness

Work has a place (especially in the Ethical life - as per Kierkegaard - or his antagonist in the book) and executing work in the appropriate manner with the appropriate attitude/mind is an important part of living a proper life.
Yet work, as we all know, is not all in life.
And business has even less a claim on life than work has - it is a pale cousin to proper work - yet assumes too great an importance and leads one astray (as a painted harlot of siren call for riches and fame).

And so I have been consolidating on the mental/psychological/spiritual improvement in re work and relationships that I started in the previous job I just had and have continued, albeit in a slightly different manner, in this job.

There is an element of adjusting to work and doing particular work (whatever it may be) for a while, until other conditions relating to my life are modified, and then looking at more radical choices associated with work and activity. There are lots of plans that I have - too many plans to actually be executed in the one lifetime that I have available to me (assuming that I will even live for a long time).

And it is certainly the case that whilst I may plan for, think about, fantazise over many different potential futures and types of work (or activities) that I could do in the future, it is virtually certain that what actually transpires in the future will be different from what I have thought and dreamt about. I am sure that, maybe, some of it will be somewhat similar, but it is just as likely that it will be completely different.

Which is an interesting concept to contemplate and address (psychologically). On the one hand, it provides a wonderful weird sort of hope for the future - hope that whatever things are like now, the future will provide something new and different, sufficiently new and different enough, to not be the same as before (in one's mind - of course, from an "identity" perspective, nothing EVER is the same as before, nor ever could be, due to the transpiration of time) that one will be invigorated and assaulted with the necessity to address life - and, therefore, as such, to live life - to engage and thereby make something worthwhile of the life lived, simply by the act of living that life in a conscious and wilful
manner. This is a good thing!

On the other hand, it is a little disconcerting to know that whatever you may think and hope for is essentially hopeless, it will never happen - and, therefore, why hope? Why bother to think, or plan, or contemplate the future?

Faced with one's ineffectualness, why bother at all - just let it all slide by, since whatever will happen is not known to us, and will happen anyway.

And it is further disconcerting to realise that one realises this and yet one still plans and dreams and hopes and thinks, way into the future, constantly turning and refining and stucturing and organising whatever it is that should be happening (and yet may never happen).
And then to realise that all of these positions, contradictory as they are, are all valid, all at the one time, and that one must hold them all in one's mind, all at once, and then still move forward, through an effort of WILL, which does, indeed, create whatever one will be moving into for the future.

Enough!

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