Wishful thinking and unreasonable faith
Dec. 19th, 2010 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
giveamouse I think it's inaccurate to say I've been agnostic, all these years. I have had a faith in the universe, or whatever, that things "will work out." That suffering (which is now) is ultimately short term, and that one function of entropy is to bring about the minimum requirements necessary to keep going as I have been, with change coming about so gradually that the desire for things, if strong enough, is motivation enough to myself (and entropy) to bring it about.
This is obviously a form of wishful thinking, and the mantra of this religion is the phrase, "things will turn out okay." Attention hasn't really been seriously called to it because I acknowledge that effort and work is required or change... or at least, I make it look to everyone, including myself, that I acknowledge that. But I also expect, on some level, that the universe will make time for me to do the things I need to do, and that I will use that time to do them, instead of something else more appealing.
I feel like this now-painfully-obvious realization is probably something that everyone else in the world already knows. And that this is the cause for why promises, of some kinds, are difficult for me to live up to. Instead of accepting a responsibility, it's almost exactly the opposite -- it's deflecting it. Something I read last week, before all the emotional chaos of my world falling out from under me, hit a note: that procrastinating is still a kind of deflection of responsibility, but that the victim of the deflection isn't someone else, but just a slightly older version of myself who has more practice in deflecting things to a future self than working on them. And a faith that somehow, "the problem will be solved," in a fully passive tense.
It hasn't looked, to everyone else, like I have this particular faith, but that's because an expression of commitment to an action sounds in my head like another expression of this faith rather than what it sounds like to everyone else - a commitment to an action. I'm not even sure that this is an issue of honesty, because it's a subconscious substitution -- if I'm lying to everyone else, it's because I'm not even aware that I'm lying to myself, too.
The really hard things in my life get abandoned in my wait for entropy to arrange the molecules of the universe appropriately for me.
This is obviously a form of wishful thinking, and the mantra of this religion is the phrase, "things will turn out okay." Attention hasn't really been seriously called to it because I acknowledge that effort and work is required or change... or at least, I make it look to everyone, including myself, that I acknowledge that. But I also expect, on some level, that the universe will make time for me to do the things I need to do, and that I will use that time to do them, instead of something else more appealing.
I feel like this now-painfully-obvious realization is probably something that everyone else in the world already knows. And that this is the cause for why promises, of some kinds, are difficult for me to live up to. Instead of accepting a responsibility, it's almost exactly the opposite -- it's deflecting it. Something I read last week, before all the emotional chaos of my world falling out from under me, hit a note: that procrastinating is still a kind of deflection of responsibility, but that the victim of the deflection isn't someone else, but just a slightly older version of myself who has more practice in deflecting things to a future self than working on them. And a faith that somehow, "the problem will be solved," in a fully passive tense.
It hasn't looked, to everyone else, like I have this particular faith, but that's because an expression of commitment to an action sounds in my head like another expression of this faith rather than what it sounds like to everyone else - a commitment to an action. I'm not even sure that this is an issue of honesty, because it's a subconscious substitution -- if I'm lying to everyone else, it's because I'm not even aware that I'm lying to myself, too.
The really hard things in my life get abandoned in my wait for entropy to arrange the molecules of the universe appropriately for me.
