Reasons

A teacher of mine - a man I admire very much - told me once that I am a naturally enthusiastic person, but I will have to learn to be disciplined. At the time, this made little sense to me. I have always been able to work hard at things, set aside time, delay gratification, forego one thing in favour of another. I assumed that this was discipline, but in time I have learned that it is not.

It is easy to be infatuated. New things are full of possibilities, and possibilities are fertile soil for dreams. I am a dreamer. Whatever I come to, whatever I take up, I find it easy to see the possibilities hidden inside it. It is not hard for me to funnel my imagination through a new lens. I meet a girl and easily imagine the life we could live together. I start a job and quickly imagine myself the boss. For a while, dreams pull me on.

But dreams are never quite real. They resemble reality, but reality always shows them up. If you spend enough time with something, and you are honest, you eventually must admit to yourself that your preconceptions were wrong. You realise that the girl of your dreams is not actually a dream character, but a real flesh-and-blood human being. At this point, you can either give up the girl or give up the dream. Either way, you will be heartbroken. If you give up the girl, the dream withers, until it finds a new source of life support. If you give up the dream, the girl comes alive before your eyes. You meet her, as she really is. This is the moment when you can actually fall in love.

This has proved true of all my relationships i. It has also proved true of my relationship with the things I do. I flew through my first years of meditation, buoyed up by books by Yogananda and Sri Aurobindo. A whole other dimension of life suddenly became possible, and my soul soared in the open space. Eventually, though, I hit reality. It was hard. Meditation is a strange and unique thing, because it consumes itself. Whatever your reasons to meditate, eventually you end up meditating on them, and seeing through. Meditation does a weird jiu-jitsu with you, where it uses your momentum to make you still. It uses your motivation to destroy your motivations. At some point, inevitably, you find yourself asking “Why continue?” That itself becomes a meditation.

The same thing happened with my writing. There is a certain joy I find in creativity, a kind of beautiful flight. Inspiration is always delicious. It’s like something perfect floods through you, and washes you clean. For a few years, I was high on inspiration. But then I realised that inspiration itself is not enough. Shakespeare’s dreams were no more beautiful than anyone else’s; what set Shakespeare apart is that he learned to put those dreams in words. That takes time, effort, and repeated failure. So many writers never write anything, because their words are never as perfect as their dreams. The vision is given us, but we have to work at the art. That takes time and effort, and in the case of fiction writing, there is no guarantee that either will ever be rewarded.

At some point in my late-twenties, all my honeymoons ended at once. Dreams dropped me, and I had to do things by my own. That was a miserable time. I had to see my girlfriend’s imperfections, and let her see mine. We had to argue. We had to learn to forgive, and love each other as humans. I had to force myself to meditate, get sick of forcing myself, give up, then feel sick about giving up. I had to sit in front of a screen for hours, looking at the words I had written, and edit and edit and edit.

I found that I’m not one of those 1% of people born with an iron will. I’m not David Goggins. I can’t sustain a constant state of struggle against the world. I need, more often than not, to rest. No matter how hard I try, if I try to force myself, I fail. I swing between periods of hard discipline, and periods of breaking down. It’s traumatic. And I found that breaking down becomes just as much a habit as discipline.

Forcing myself didn’t work. I don’t understand why I ever thought it would. I suppose it’s because that’s the only example of discipline we’re given. We think discipline is about doing things you don’t want to do because something threatens to punish you if you don’t. But pressure always produces cracks. Perhaps they only manifest after time, or in some hidden way you can pretend not to see, but it is my conviction that force is never really effective.

Why? Because you are working against conscience. If you have to be forced to do something, it means you don’t want to do it. Some deeper part of you rebels, and I have found that the secret of discipline is not trampling over that deeper part of yourself and ignoring it, but talking to it, understanding it, convincing it, and bringing it around.

I am at a stage in life where things either spiral up or spiral down. In the life of the spirit, I believe, we only get the chance to nudge things, from time to time, as the ball spins past . Apart from that, everything is done. We only act through small windows. We are given a few little moments when we make a few little choices, and those choices snowball. I have tried to make my discipline about recognising those moments: stopping when I feel that a question is being asked of me - letting my own emotional wake catch up with me, letting myself feel the tiredness and angst - and making the right decision. Not forcing myself to do something because I feel I must, but giving myself the space to do what is right.

To help with this, I have drawn up a list of my reasons. I keep it next to my bed. It has all sorts of stuff on it, from ‘I want to make my girlfriend proud’ to ‘I want to impress strangers’. The phrase ‘I WILL DIE’ stands in capitals halfway down the page. Some of my reasons are just the names of people who inspire me: men and women who have grown broad enough to carry other people on their back. I have the names of people I love who have suffered. I have a lot of names, because I have found that the one thing for which I can sacrifice myself is people I love. A part of me knows that the only real reason I do anything is love. I can lower myself if I know someone else will be lifted up. That makes me proud. I suspect the capacity to do this is the definition of dignity. Children require more from other people than they can give. We become adult when, nett, we can give more than we need.

I’m lucky, because the element of love is very obvious in the things I do. I meditate because I want to love more. I write because I want to share moments of beauty, which is love. My dream for my writing is that one day someone will come up to me in the street, and say that a story I wrote, or a book, made them want to do the dishes at night. It made them want to treasure their parents or kids. It gave them the courage to love, or dream, or commit. It gave them a nudge, and suddenly they felt free.

To that end, I have finally published my website. I start with nine stories: six of my most recent, and three old ones that are close to my heart. In time, I’ll add more. I also hope soon to publish a school boy book I’m extremely fond of, as well as some longer stories I haven’t been able to find a home for. I’ll put those up this year. I’m also, as of recently, proudly tweeting on the Instantgram. I haven’t quite worked out the mechanics of it yet, but I hope to post little things that I find beautiful. I want to treat it like a series of art projects, and not like ads. Feel free to follow me there!

With love, and hope for new beginnings,
Alistair

Street in Tahiti
Paul Gauguin