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The Oxymoron of Self-Control
If it is part of self, how is it I have to work to control it?
Each of us lives our life under the encumbrance of our own imperfection. We try to resist and change something in the core of us, which we feel so strongly should be ours to manipulate as freely as we wish. And yet, we have a knotted bundle of wants and desires, emotions and thoughts, swirling about in us (and us in it), pulling us hither and thither like a storm.
One wants to lose weight but craves cake; one wants to be fit but cannot summon the motivation for exercise; we seek to resist those who damage us but love them nonetheless; we want to be brave, but fear pushes us back; and a million other things we want to do, and we are our only obstacle, and why should it be this way? If all the world is beyond our control, and every happening from the weather to the actions of animals and neighbors in this grand vastness is beyond us, shouldn’t this one speck which we call ourselves be ours to exercise our will over as we wish?
And yet, maybe there’s some fact underlying this that is at first saddening but ultimately enlightening: Maybe our every effort to control and to be something, to have a defined and demarcated existence, fails to the last because we indeed have no control at all and no identity to speak of. Maybe I am just as much the…
