29 - The off button

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Turn of the lights from time to time or we will suffer a graver inconvenience than a grazed knee

- Willyam Jameson

When I am attempting to achieve some goal, the obvious things I need to do to achieve that goal are of primary importance to me. I construct an internal sequence of actions that should lead me to the desired destination, and I subsequently act on them, achieving in this some end that is broadly similar to the image I created in my mind. This is rational enough and would be perfectly fine if I were a simple binary machine - that either did a thing or did not do that thing, if there were no other graduated modes of being available to me. But the truth is that a more subtle awareness is required to approach optimal functioning. We have to keep an eye on the road, but we also have to remain aware of the fitness of the vehicle we’re driving on it.

In doing a thing, I may have to adjust all sorts of running processes on the fly to adapt to changing circumstances. This might involve desisting half way, or changing my approach mid-stream. Each change involves the processing of creating the new course, the actions involved, the possible consequences. Resources are shifted away from the initial course. In this there is little processing allocated to properly desisting from the old process. It vanishes from awareness by virtue of the focus requires to make the adaptation. In this way a complex sequence of multiple processes might be running simultaneously at a given task, even one as banal as simply crossing the road. When I stop performing the action, the resources it was using are freed up for other purposes. This freeing up of resources occurs in maximally efficient way that would have evolved naturally. By maximally efficient I mean, the most resources freed up as fast as possible for re-use. There is a trade off for efficiency. The trade off involves getting the most resources, the quickest – leaving a fair amount of residual ghost processes persisting, albeit minimally. It’s a fair trade off in the context of the moment, but in the longer term, these ghost processes can accumulate. Of course this depends on the investment we have in them in the first place. The resources we devoted to them and the significance we placed on them. Irrelevant things are unlikely to persist in any impactful way in our consciousness.

What we aware of is not necessarily what is actually happening. It is what is happening in conscious awareness but this awareness is a relatively narrow band of present based information and activity. Persistence of intention can exist for longer than the requirements of a given task. If I fervently undertake a certain task – Let’s say I vow to give up punching squirrels. This task today becomes the most important thing. I find the delivery of a knuckle sandwich to a small tree based placental mammal to be an extremely compelling activity. It triggers all sorts of pleasing hormonal cascades in my brain. So in order to counteract this compulsion I have to put lot of intention into it. So I dig in and pour all my vigour into this decision. And I make it past the first day but then the memories of previous rodent battering binges creep in. The echo of my first blissful experience undermining my decision to quit. And before I know it, I’ve folded and find myself chasing poor Sylvester the Canadian Red around a tree yet again.

Now in this there is a legacy of conflicting processes, intentions and actions. Moreover, the intensity of my intention to quit the activity has been superseded by my decision to yield to temptation. But what happens to the energy I’ve put into my resolution? Is it simply wiped out by my subsequent change of heart? Experience dictates that it doesn’t quite work like that. (That experience dictates it automatically implies that you might well be best served to do your own google search on this matter) - The processes and connections I have formed to serve my original purposes persist, certainly with less energy, but nonetheless – I have not focussed my attention on freeing up those resources properly. I am doing a thing, and then I am doing the next thing. I rarely turn my attention to properly switching off the lights on the first thing. I have simply changed direction and forgotten that I even made that promise to myself. Think then of a lifetime of similar activities. Generally speaking I don’t remember to switch off the lights on processes. I don’t engage in wilful inhibition as much as excitation. There is likely, therefore, to be a lot of unnecessary persistence in the system.

The extent of this persistence, of course, depend to some extent on the health of my system, and the intensity of my commitment and the circumstances surrounding it. Things like a less-than-healthy sleep pattern can significantly impact on our effective functioning. When we sleep well, we clear out the greater bulk of the accumulated mental detritus. But when the human system is working in a less than optimum manner, for example if suffering under the yoke of long term stress or depression or some other malady, then resource usage can go awry and cause all sorts of issues.

I think of doing a thing and when I do that thing I do not necessarily contemplate all the things I am necessarily not doing in that action. I do not think about the inhibition involved in its successful engagement. Even when attempting to relax, I am thinking about the action of relaxing. Effective inhibition is a necessary prerequisite for achieving wellbeing. I cannot avoid stress, tension or high pressure situations, but I can best negotiate these things and minimise their potentially damaging impacts on me, if I remain relaxed about it. If, on the other hand, I persist in a highly challenged condition, and follow the promptings of that condition and take the parameters of the situation too seriously or emotionally overestimate the consequences of failure, if, in short, I am too highly invested in a particular kind of outcome, then I am unlikely to be relaxed about it. The exterior agents of tension become interiorised. And in this activity they can sometimes take on a life of their own.

What I have projected onto the situation becomes real to me. I lack a reasonable and qualifying perspective and so my body and my mind becomes habituated to expect a certain kind of stress, to seek it out and to respond by default to stimuli in a stress inspired manner. Systemic tension,rigidity - signals my body to be in a persistent state of anticipatory readiness which in the absence of a real world threat, places an unnecessary burden on my body’s resources. Anticipation of negative outcomes can prime the system to persist in an already defeated mode that similarly taxes my systems resources even more profoundly and makes all attempts at positive action seem futile. Habituated stress, unresolved tensions, excessive preoccupation with expectation and responsibilities too keenly felt, are enemies of relaxation and by extension, enjoyment.

If I want to live a successful life, which is to say a satisfying, enjoyable one, then the primary consideration has to be the quality of what I accumulate internally. If my interior landscape is poorly maintained and chaotic, then nothing external will suffice to improve it. There is no magic pill for this. My culture seems to urge me to focus upon the observable external attributes of things and how desirable or otherwise they might be. Nothingwrong with such external influences or distractions in and of themselves. And nothing wrong with their interaction with me either, provided I can keep them in their place. Provided I understand exactly what that place is in the scheme of things. Provided I don’t become convinced that these inessential things are the most important things to own or experience, and that their absence in my life might be some kind of cosmic slight for my personal shortcomings.