The will to won’t

A ‘habit’ is a peculiar thing; you never realize when you start on it and yet soon enough it becomes a thing-you-always-do. Then there’s the bit about how it’s much harder to keep up/ start on a ‘good’ habit and how it’s tougher to let go of a bad habit. WHY is it so difficult giving up a habit we picked up in the first place? It’s not as if we were born with it or would die if we don’t do it. Why is it so tough to have the will power to decide and stick by “I won’t”?

Have you ever realized that the more self-destructive a habit, the easier it is to pick it up? Whether it’s smoking 20 cigarettes a day or constant self-analysis that only leaves you with guilt for being a certain way or not being another… I do both: Smoke like a shit-brained maniac and analyse to a point where I begin to bore myself (and then worry as to why I am so boring…). Self-analysis only shows you what you lack or what you are doing wrong, with no solutions on how to stop it. Of course you could let another analyze you; it usually involves paying big bucks. You analyze day in and day out, even when you are asleep (they call it the subconscious) and only end up realizing that you are on a suicide mission of self-destruction.

“I am not a man, I am dynamite,” wrote Nietzsche. I would agree. Human beings are genetically wired to self-destruct in 60-70 years and medical science at best manages to push that limit or delay the inevitable for some decades. Don’t quote the number of humans who touch their 90s or beyond, like every other program, they are an anomaly. If left to our own devices, most of us would kill ourselves much earlier in life. Why do you think kids need watching all the time?

Infants will willingly crawl off their beds/cots, toddlers will happily run on roads and get under cars, or stand under windows and other pointed stuff that can pierce their skulls (have done both as a kid), five-year-olds are adept at throwing things at each other meant to seriously injure… I know of a three-year-old who managed to climb atop the kitchen slab, SIT on the hot plate and turn it on and was saved from toasting his balls by the timely appearance of his mother. Please notice that babies have to be TAUGHT how to kiss, but slapping comes naturally to them. “Give Aunty JB a kitchie, not like THAT, that’s slobbering over her cheek, be a good baby, give her a chweet kitchie now…” And THWACK. Have you ever been slapped by a baby? They slap REAL hard and it hurts real bad. Who taught them?

Post infancy and er, toddler-hood, we become adolescents; if you survive that unscathed, you reach adulthood… Growing up is NOT fun. For one you have to start paying taxes. Two, you cannot get away with half the things you did as a child (try slapping someone). The whole point of being ‘an individual’ is lost because you are supposed to behave in a prescribed manner, which is basically like everyone else. And you realize you have to unlearn every goddamn thing you were taught as a child. Like perhaps the fact that love is not enough, love is never enough. “The idea that love is not enough is a particularly painful one”.

Of course you can make this entire Journey of Realization a fun one, but you usually need a lot of money to make it fun. Depending on varying degrees of individual resistance to all these disturbing truths, we all end up being ticking time bombs; some go off early, some voluntarily, some are forced into it but eventually, we all meet the same fate. Some of us expedite the process by smoking out our lungs, or snorting coke, poking needles into us. Some do it indirectly through constant poisoning of the mind with negative thoughts, comparisons, refusal to give up the past and constant self-analysis that just makes matters worse... “I am not a man, I am dynamite.”

As author Richard Flanagan says in The Unknown Terrorist, “Everyday now somebody somewhere is a dynamite. They are not an image. They are the walking dead, and so are the people who are standing round them. Reality was never made by realists, but by dreamers…” Flanagan then goes on to define realism as, “the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed.” IF reality disappoints, what do humans live for? Why do they teach good things, why do they tell fairy tales to children? If reality disappoints, what makes us go forward without hanging from the ceiling the moment the first pimple appears? That's the reason I don't read Virginia Woolf and nor have I ever read Nietzsche: I don’t know how I will react to what they say. The Nietzsche quote is from the book I am supposedly reading except that I’m stuck on Page 86 because of a BAD HABIT.

I don’t even remember when I started on it or why. What I do know is that it’s completely taking away the satisfaction of reading books. Earlier I could go without food, water or conversation and finish a 500-pager in three hours straight. Now if I like the book, I tend to sit and mull over a line or a paragraph until I come to my own conclusion regarding whatever’s caught my attention and I just cannot read further. So a ‘good’ book now takes days to finish or hangs in the middle, unread, because there’s something I don’t agree with. Or consider the second habit: If it’s a thriller, I being trying to outguess the author and HAVE to turn to the last page to see if I was right… I do the same if it’s a particularly bad book and I can’t be bothered reading the whole thing.

So despite really liking the way Flanagan writes, I am stuck on certain lines and a particular chapter. Am typing out those for you all… Let me know what you think. Meanwhile, I will try and break some habits that are threatening to destroy some very precious, beautiful things I have and need to nurture.

PS: Perhaps the only answer to read peacefully and perhaps live peacefully too (till the Eventual) lies in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Lobotomy. No brain, no pain, hmm?

Choosing some bits of this excerpt from The Unknown Terrorist... these 'spoke' to me, am nicknaming this passage, The Death Of A Lie… And it’s the closest I’ve come to reading anything that describes the end of togetherness so perfectly, so sadly…

Nick Loukakis had had an affair. Maybe he meant something by it, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he’d wanted a way out of his marriage. Or maybe he just wasn’t thinking. Maybe the affair ended the marriage. Or maybe the marriage was over when the affair began. His wife never found out. She always knew, but her knowing grew from a vague awareness easily put away, to a bitter knowledge she could still deny, to an enraged desolation when she one day told him she knew, that she had always known, did he think she was such a fool? And he felt his world collapse into a terrifying white hole into which he fell and into which he was still falling.

They stayed together and watched each other slowly become strangers, watched their love die as you watch a great old gum tree succumb to dieback. The affair was over for him but it was just the beginning for her. She never found out then, but it was as if each day now she lived another day of those years of lies and deceit; and his punishment was to witness her suffering. First just the leaf tips in the distant crown brown a little at the edges, then whole leaves, then a branch here and there. Still the tree lives, and everyone says it will be fine… But when his marriage began dying back, Nick Loukakis discovered nothing is fine,

Each day some small thing – a joke, a shared intimacy, a sweet memory – he found to have withered and died. Caresses fell like dead leaves. Conversations cracked and then broke. And in the end what remained, Nick Loukakis discovered, was nothing; nothing to keep it going, just a large thing still standing erect and proud, only everything about it had withered and died.

Nick Loukakis realized that for a long time there had been something about his life that he now saw as innocence… But then this thing happened – something broke and he came to realize he had broken it and that it could not be put back together, not his family nor his life.

And yet he knew his wife loved him and he lover her. But something had happened, something had broken and he knew neither how to fix it nor end it. The sex was absurd, pointless; an affirmation only of what they didn’t have – the affection, tenderness, hope and dreams that had once been theirs. It was a dismal affair of penetration and her body moving only where it was shoved by his thrusts… But the absence of sex he could adjust to as a price, a penance, perhaps. It was the absence of touch, of warmth, of animal connection… And yet he knew she loved him and would always love him.

How was it possible to live with another human being so closely, to eat with them, sleep with them, smell their breath, and yet be so unspeakably alone?