#101 COMPULSION

DON’T ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU WANT

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

A

lot of life events just do not seem worthwhile getting started especially after many months have passed and the consequences of those actions have started to filter into your daily life like the bright white sun filtered through the manufactured glass window.

The new year is not one of those life events that you should not have bothered to start in the first place, particularly since there is absolutely no choice to be decided upon. The ellipting earth and the constant sun have too much say in the matter to prevent another year from starting.

For those revelers of time who celebrated New Year’s Eve, you know very well that on the morning of New Year’s Day that death is not an option to escape time since the year has already begun.

If you are too cautious moving forward, you may miss the opportunities that more confident people reap. People must find that careful balance throughout the year between safety and risk.

Opportunities for life events come with many traps. What looks good in the moment may become a deep regret overtime. Experience often makes people all the wiser while at the same time receiving that gradual realization that recklessly plunging into uncertain circumstances may not be the most efficient way to get the most out of life.

Settling down in Pompeii just prior to the big volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD has definitively been determined by the evidence to have been the wrong choice. Evidence beyond explanation exists to that conclusion since the entire area was encased in 4 to 6 meters of volcanic ash and pumice to the surprise of the inhabitants.

Screentime is a lesser evil but is nevertheless equally irreversible. The day can never be recovered. And those arrays of stimulants from the metaverse experienced over hours of screen time, that in comparison dwarfs time spent anywhere else during the day, made you into a statue. Unlike the citizens of Pompeii, though, you still have a chance for real life when the sunrises in the morning into a clear blue sky.

If you want a statue made of you, those ways just mentioned above are not even remotely the ways to go about it.

That long hike into the rugged backcountry of a mountain range might be more regrettable at three hours into the day when you have three more hours to go to reach the top, than when gearing up in the parking lot at the trail head. You have to sharpen your wits and set aside a bit of thinking time to decide whether or not to carry on when there are also three hours ahead hiking back out if you decide to turn around.

That ocean swim against the current can be even more agonizing of an idea with the choices being severely limited to either continued swimming one way or the other way or sure death by drowning.

The situation people get themselves into can be uniquely singular with the most flattering take on the situation being a kind of highly stylized suicide attempt. We speak of only figurative suicide now in which people want to change and put themselves in a game changing position to change.

Unfortunately, change can be fickle with many failed attempts, especially when people blindly get started without having yet acquired the full skill set necessary to accomplish that task of reassessing oneself and moving forward with those uniquely positive results.

Quite often people must make several attempts at change only to begin again in a less than advantageous position than the original starting spot from where everyone will have to work even harder than before just to regain equilibrium and try again to advance the individual cause for change.

Few criminals regret what they have done – leaving the psychological energy instead for bemoaning getting caught or coming away with less than what was expected.

Genuine efforts at sui generis change comes with a moral cost when failure is the end result. That same pull from inside is what gets the moral being to start again and move forward. Achieving incremental gains may be enough for the moral person to try and try again until achieving complete and total success.

What motivates the immoral person may befuddle the best of us. Whereas morality feels good and only feels better with greater effort.

And what conditions the personality to morality may be as complicated as why we started here to begin with. If humanity was just left alone from the beginning of time, there might be a budding morality with a lot of underlining naivety preventing the maturity of thought.

And when humanity is forced to confront certain scenarios forcing decisions based on the influence of good and evil forces, the individual learns to be moral but also picks up a bit of evil through the process as well.

True human experience requires the nurturing of moral forces from within while simultaneously developing temperance toward everything else that pulls people every other way.

Such is the human condition, with learning and development an everlasting fluid situation moving forward from that core being given to us on the inside through creation.