Perhaps you are an exceptional individual, having trained your own mind much more than your neighbors train theirs. And perhaps it’s quite obvious that your own priorities have been chosen with more diligence and care than they choose their priorities. Perhaps the things you think about and study and promote are considerably more advanced than your neighbors are willing to invest themselves in. And perhaps, if they would listen to you and invest in some of these things, it would make the world around you a considerably better place.
Well, good for you! And I don’t mean that sarcastically, mind you. Good for you! Congratulations on having found a better way in this or that regard, and having disciplined yourself to follow it. This is good and proper (assuming, of course, that you’re actually right about it!), and yes, the rest of the world really ought to listen to you about this.
But let’s talk about the realities of your daily world for a minute, because, if you’re like me, it can get even better with some more work. So let’s get practical as I attempt to make my main point by way of a mundane daily example:
Do you ever have to go to the bathroom? If you’re like me, the answer is yes. And that doesn’t seem nearly as important as the important things you are in the habit of pursuing, but nature has a way of insisting, and we simply must answer the call or suffer various consequences. (I trust you’ll be OK with me not spelling it out for you here!) And this is one of the adjunct realities of life for humans in this world. Even the most important religious or civic pursuits can be interrupted by having to go to the bathroom. And for most of us, this is a reality that’s not too hard to grasp—even though we may hate to admit it, and might even be disposed to pout about it somewhat!
Fortunately for us, the body sends us easy-to-read signals that it’s bathroom time. And most of us learn successfully to decouple from whatever else we were working on, in order to satisfy the unrelated and temporary bathroom priorities that arise throughout the day. But just how difficult is that decoupling? Are you the sort to decouple from what you’re doing and go to the bathroom right away upon the first urge? Or do you take a more balanced approach, taking the first urges under advisement, and planning your next few minutes in the most efficient manner? Or are you the sort to put it off, refusing to decouple from what you’re doing until you’ve reached a state of emergency?
And as you may have figured out by now, this post is not really about bodily functions, but about priorities—and particularly, about our own internal disposition as it regards decoupling from important things to take care of other important things. And here are some good questions in pursuit of knowing ourselves with regard to such things:
- Just how pliable are we when the interrupting priorities present themselves?
- How flexible?
- How willing and ready to deal with it responsibly? How skilled are we at begin interrupted?
- How mature are we about it?
- Can we take it in stride with ease, or do we get upset about it? And deep down inside us, and the core level of who we are, are we upset that this is how it is, or have we yielded to this particular reality of this real world in which we live?
It’s a bit embarrassing, I suppose, but I have a great example of the very thing I’m talking about. As a kid, I utterly hated to leave play time with my friends to make a bathroom trip. I suppose we’d call this FOMO today (Fear of Missing Out), though I’m not sure there was a name for it back in the early seventies. I had such a hard time decoupling that I’d frequently get myself in quite a state of emergency when it just couldn’t be put off any longer. And it took me quite some time to learn how to deal common-sensibly with nature’s call in the moment. It was a psychological difficulty for me, learning the practicalities of this real world, and coping with their rude interruptions of what seemed much more important at the time.
And I’m still like this today in other ways. I spend quite a lot of time researching and writing about things I think are very important, and doing various projects that are very important to me, yet the adjunct realities of this real world continue to exist, interrupting me with phone calls and bills to be paid and deadlines to be met and situations to be managed. And I often have quite a hard time decoupling from my philosophical/societal priorities in order to satisfy the mundane requirements of life in this real world.
Even this very writing session is probably an example of what I’m talking about. As I’m up early, greatly enjoying these quietest moments of the day (It’s 5:40 a.m.), I’m supposed to be doing my daily workout, so as to get it off my back, in order to save the rest of my day from the constant emotional irritation of needing to do the workout—and to avoid the failure of skipping the day’s workout. And further still, to avoid the debilitating downward spiral that I have learned from experience: that one missed workout leads to two, and to lower energy, and to dietary cravings and binges, and to depression. It is a constant battle (if I fight it) and a constant disappointment, disgrace, and deficit if I don’t. It is a relentless reality in this physical world, and it’s quite hard for me, especially since it has no direct relationship to the philosophical and social considerations that really float my boat. And it’s even harder for me to decouple from writing and researching in order to work out, because working out doesn’t come with the same palpable physical urges as the bathroom business does. No, it’s more subtle than that.
And this means that Jack has to develop some psychological/philosophical controls in his mind and in his will, in order to deal with this need, since the body itself simply will not insist on it as it insists on going to the bathroom. In other words, for Jack to live in good bodily health in this world, it is necessary for Jack to fortify his cognitive/moral inner life with some strong thought-habits and convictions on this matter. Otherwise, physical fitness takes a backseat to the things that seem/feel more important to me.
And perhaps you can relate to all this so far, even though this is still not what I really sat down to write about. No, I had in mind some priorities, not of the adjunct sort I’ve been discussing, but of the philosophical sort. So please bend with me as we switch directions for few paragraphs before I circle back to what we’ve discussed so far.
Vying Realities
Whatever it is that you’re good at thinking about and focusing on, there may yet be other realities that require your attention, too—other cognitive/philosophical/moral topics that are also crucial, yet are not so naturally on the forefront of your typical daily interest. And some of them could possibly be even more important than the really-important things that already have a high priority in your daily life. And this could span lots of topics and take on many different shapes. For instance, your family life could be suffering, although your career is going great—or vice versa. Or the roof’s leaking, even though you’ve done an awesome job fixing the leak under the kitchen sink—or vice versa. Or even though you’ve worked really hard to be kind, you’re not very good about being stern when that’s what’s needed—or vice versa. Or perhaps you’re great at finding fault with others, but terrible at seeing your own faults—or vice versa.
We’re all different. Even though we all have a lot of the same ingredients, we’re not all mixed in the same proportions, or cooked in the same way. And I’d venture to say that none of us have got the whole of life figured out just so and perfectly balanced. And this happens even in the higher philosophical pursuits, such as politics and religion, where we can be really keen on one (great) idea, and really dull (or negligent, even) on another. It seems we have a very hard time decoupling from the one thing (whether it’s good or bad—whether it’s perfect, or still in need of tweaking) in order to take care of another. And whether it’s from FOMO, or from any of a number of other hangups that make decoupling hard for us, it can still lead to some serious predicaments.
And let me stop right here to say that I think that this world is impossibly complex for us, and that we’ll never get everything figured out perfectly. that’s just the nature of the world in which we live. There’s must too much truth, too little time, and too little room in our brains for it all, anyway. Even so, there’s not one of us who has no room for improvement. And if it’s important to us to know the truth of a matter, we actually have lots of tools at our disposal for researching and considering and vetting a great many things. But we so often settle too soon, assuming ourselves to have found the whole truth of a matter when we have not.
The Highway to Truth
Consider the following diagram, depicting a metaphorical highway to truth. Consider how many exits there are—each one closer to the truth than was the one before—each one being more advanced than the previous ones—and yet, each one still being an exit, and stopping short of what was supposedly the ultimate destination.
Wherever we are on this journey to the truth (if we are on it at all!), it’s so easy for us to look back at where we have traveled, and to review our time on the road, the exits we’ve passed by, and even the ones we took for a time before getting back on the road. And when we size up our journey so far, it’s easier to focus on all that, rather than on the as-yet-undiscovered territory ahead. And think about how natural this is! That is, we’ve already experienced what lies behind. Naturally, then, it’s easy to focus on it too much while focusing too little on the road ahead. It becomes a priority problem for us—the past vying against the future for our attention—the imperfect vying against the perfect—the journey vying against the destination—what is better vying against what is best.
And if you’re like me, there’s so much hurt and frustration in that journey so far that it’s easy to look back on it as a series of struggles with other people, who insisted at getting off at an exit we knew would not lead to the whole truth. It’s easy to get tired and even sullen about that, even, and if we’re not careful, we can find ourselves having pulled over to focus on just what bad decisions others have made in getting off the highway. And it’s amazing how long we can sit there, steaming over that, and not realizing that our own forward progress has stopped! And this is quite a serious problem that deserves an article of its own! But that’s for another day.
So, What Now?
It would be easy to wrap this all up with some admonition about never exiting until we have reached the whole truth of a matter. And that could be a very useful and inspiring point to make. But even so, if you’re like me, you’re still going to have go to the bathroom while you’re on your journey. Even if, in your mind, you’re on a spiritual journey—seeking out a second world, better than this one—you’re still going to have to eat and sleep and go to the bathroom and pay the bills and buy food, and so forth. And so this means we simply must exit that highway to truth, decoupling from the search from time to time to take care of the practical matters of this real world into which all of our lives have been set.
And there are among us many practically-minded individuals who will remind us of this fact often. And I dare say that some of them—the more extreme cases—have pulled over not only to take care of business, but to remind everybody else to pull over—making everybody else’s adjunct business their apparent mission in life. And not surprisingly, they, themselves, have not traveled far since they made the adjunct practicalities the priority in their lives.
So, what’s the right balance?, you may ask. And oh, my! Isn’t that quite the question?!
And my answer is that I don’t know, exactly! And I’m pretty sure that the question, “What should Jack be doing with his time?”, is the most relentless question in my existence! But I can share with you a couple of paradigms that keep me getting back on that highway:
And the third paradigm, for which I haven’t created a meme, is that it is God himself who is at the end of that Highway to Truth. And God is worth the trouble to reach!
So I keep at it, daily struggling over when I need to exit the road for the necessary adjunct realities, and when I should keep going. And I don’t always make the right choices. In fact, I recognize that I have frequently made the wrong choices, especially when it comes to the logistics of fitness and life organization, to give a couple of examples. (You should see my basement!) And I wonder about what qualities I still need to adopt in order to do better at things like that—and how much better at it I can really become! But at the same time, I’m adamant that I will not be off the road too long at a time for any such adjunct need.
And I don’t suppose I ever have a day where I’m not on that highway somehow or other, for I’m always thinking about and analyzing things, even if I’m not sitting at my computer researching them or writing about them. But even so, I’m certain there are still other things that need such mental work—some of which I’m not even aware of yet, and some of which I’m aware of, and yet negligent about—and some of which I’ve simply been too busy to get done.
And that makes it even harder on the adjunct practicalities like going to the bathroom and exercising and such, because I have learned enough to realize that I have a huge learning deficit of undetermined size. But it’s generally fun and certainly rewarding so far—even though I could have made a lot more money if learning did not require so much leisure time!
And I’d really like to sit here longer, examining my own thoughts on this, in hopes of getting a better and better grasp on it all, but I’ll just have to settle, for now, for whatever thinking I can get done during the workout that I’m determined to start right now!
