The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
– Jesus, Matthew 26:41
Happy Palm Sunday, everyone. Today also just happens to be the 10th birthday of my youngest, which makes me and the missus officially old now that all of our kids have hit their double digits.
I’ve been struck by something of late, and has to do with the impending election. Sort of. Not sure if this is a byproduct of getting older, but I’ve found myself settling into a mindset that I’ve started referring to as optimistic pessimism. A friend of mine told me this is just realism, but that’s boring, so I’m running with this.
What sort of contradictory bull is this, you ask? Well, in essence it’s just accepting things as they are and not hoping they turn out otherwise, with an added hint of being fine with that outcome. Take this election, for instance. Am I pleased we’ve got two people who could very easily die before their term is up and are already showing signs (if not more than signs) of being well in cognitive decline? Hell, no. Is there anything I can do about that? Nope. Is what it is. I’m not going to lean on some hope something comes out of left field and changes the roster or makes America realize pitting a couple of octogenarians against each other is a level of idiocy hard to believe. Have to accept it, and what comes as a result.
While the election is something that really keyed me into this idea, I realized I’ve been adopting it across most aspects of my life. Clients at work are going to be absurd, but there’s nothing to be done there. We endure, do what we must, and move on. Personal matters come in and we do the same.
However. The big However. Acceptance is not the key aspect of this whole thing. Acceptance – and expectation of the stupidity – is the pessimistic end. The optimism is, and has to be, what sets this all apart. What makes it work. The optimism comes from two places. The first being how I approach these things in the day to day. Will things go poorly? Maybe. Someday, certainly, but that doesn’t mean I should live in the dumps in anticipation. We only have so much time, grab the positive wherever you can. That’s the simple part.
The hard part comes from Matthew’s Gospel today. From Christ, really. Because, as the quote so elegantly puts it, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
It’s an easy thing to simply accept the world as it is and move on. One could say it’s basic human nature. We, as people, are inclined to accept and continue on with no real effort to change the flow. Some things seem too big for us to affect and so we don’t bother. We complain, sure, but we don’t go out of our way to do anything about it. Because the flesh is weak.
This part, the hard part, the true part of the optimism, is in overcoming that weakness. In recognizing that, yes, we may be too small to have an impact on these enormous matters, but that doesn’t imply we are meaningless. To crib a phrase, change begins with us, individually. We have an indelible effect on those with whom we are close, so sitting around and just adopting the “whatever, it is what it is” mindset and not actually working to become the things you want to see from the world is setting yourself up for failure.
Remember, the only person you can every truly control is yourself. Pluck the log from your own eye before removing the plank from your brothers, that kind of deal. I, for instance, loathe the state of modern media and its overreliance on existing property / sequels / remakes / overbearing focus on identity. I want stories. Real stories. Real characters. Tales and people and settings that evoke wonder or dread or anger or any of the infinite range of human emotion. Do I expect that stuff to come from modern Hollywood? No, so I accept that and decide to craft my own stories. Will I have the same reach? No, but they can reach someone. Somebody out there might get some enjoyment from them, might have some inspiration or thoughts provoked from what I produce. And that’s enough.
As is so often the case with these posts, I just want to convey one simple thing – the importance of bettering oneself for the betterment of the world around them. I know life’s hard. I know we’re under the gun, plugged into the machine, always moving from place to place and task to task. I know how exhausting it is. But – always but – we can’t let that machine eat us alive. There’s more to life than the grind, more than simply existing. We have to keep striving. Striving to build a better world here, and to be worthy of a better life after we leave here behind.
Find the time, my lovely Dwellers. A small bit here and there to start, maybe, but find it. Find it and cultivate it. Make it work for you. It’ll be worth it in the end. I promise.
Little bit of a postscript addendum here, but sorry for the scatterbrain on this one. I wrote it in several chunks over a very busy day. I keep saying I’m going to pre-plan this stuff some day and get past the stream-of-consciousness, but it is clearly not this day.
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