Who in the When?

So I’ve been on another hiatus from this blog. I tend to only be able to keep up on one outlet at a time, and I’ve been involved in a long string of projects and outlets, professional and personal, and am just now returning to this nexus.

Quite a bit of what I’ve spent my time and energy on over the past many months has brought me to consider questions such as:

• What are my goals for the kind of world I want to live in, both broadly and close to home?
• How are my right-now choices contributing to the kind of world I’m creating?
• How am I letting thoughts of the past or future distract or mislead me from what I should be doing/thinking now?
• Who do I want to be?
• How am I behaving, thinking, feeling, choosing in ways that lead toward becoming that person?
• Can I create a Focus in the form of that person I’d like to be, in that world I’d like to enjoy, and use that as a template for how and who I am now?

I’m still working on those answers, and I think that’s the point. I feel that it’s the process of continually asking these questions that continually leads to better and better answers.

Right now, my answers were to stop by and post again on this blog. Now, I’ve got some work to do, before I can get digging back into better answers, and maybe even better questions.

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I thought about offering up some answers, but I just couldn’t justify them.

I recently read about a study that talked about how we rationalize our lives. It concluded that we didn’t necessarily make the choices we preferred, but the ones we were able to rationalize to our satisfaction. One of the researchers put it this way:

Everyone feels that as a rational creature he must be able to give a connected, logical, and continuous account of himself, his conduct, and opinions, and all his mental processes are unconsciously manipulated and revised to that end.

– Ernest Jones

That is, we’ll choose what we can rationalize, and barring that, we’ll find a way to rationalize what we already chose.

Rationalization can be fairly harmless, especially if we apply TRUE rationality and really examine what we want and why — that can even be beneficial. But there’s things we’ll think, do, say, desire, and so on… that don’t have what we’ll feel comfortable calling a “good reason”. What’ll we do then? What will we think of ourselves? How will we move forward?

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As much as you’re ready to, go ahead and start making better choices. You can totally do it.

I found myself at the library last week and decided to browse through the DVDs for something to watch, and came across “What the Bleep Do We Know?”, an odd philosophical/metascientific flick I’d been meaning to take a look at sometime. I found it a pretty fun romp through what for me is familiar concepts, but for many people it’s a pretty mindblowing (or ridiculous, or both) look into a whole other way of seeing the world.

Anyway, something someone said in it is on my mind today — or at least, the paraphrased way I remember it. Someone said that today, the field of Psychology doesn’t give enough weight to people and their choices when determining what goes on in our heads. That so much of what is termed “mental illness” is really the accumulated result of choices we make. And in order to be better, we simply need to make better choices.

That made sense to me.

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