A million little choices (and how they shape a life over the course of a lifetime)
What does your mind turn over when you’ve got nothing to think about? Does it play with aspirations or worries? Fears or regrets? Are you sketching a hope-filled future? Or does your mind turn to the worst case scenario?
What we return to again and again says something about us - it is helpful information. It reveals our inner hum, the background noise to our lives. I think of this as something like a compass, something of an interior magnetic north that reveals a glimpse of the loves we are tending.
Our thought life is like a garden
What we hold before our minds both consciously and subconsciously, can be likened to tending a garden. We water those subjects that we turn to over and over. Nourishing them, encouraging them to grow and establish a deep root system. Simply by giving something our concentrated attention, we rewire the connections and pathways in our brain.
And the things we dwell on the most reveal our true loves.
‘Loves’ might be a surprising word to use to describe the persistent subject of our interior focus. In general we reserve ‘love’ first for people dear to us, then significant positive memories and special places, and moving outwards to cherished pastimes, and favourite foods and experiences. But ‘loves’ is also appropriate to describe longings, the things we dream for, the aspirations that we believe will bring fulfilment. This could be safety and security, this could be romantic fulfilment and companionship, or it could be achieving status within our field or profession.
We all have our vision of what ‘the good life’ is
James K.A. Smith collects these categories together as: The good life [1]. Largely unspoken and even unarticulated, our vision of what we believe the good life to be is a silent driver behind our choices and priorities.
So, what is the good life according to you?
Is it the safety, comfort and security of a simple shelter and sustainable income? Is it sharing a bed with a beautiful person? Is it riches and luxury and freedom from restraint? Is it following the course charted by feelings and changing desires in pursuit of authenticity - where ever that course may lead?
Your answer will powerfully shape how you see the world.
And your answer is powerfully reinforced by practice.
Which brings me back to the key metaphor and aim of this blog post, the metaphor of the compass, with its habituated ‘magnetic North’.
The good life is subconsciously formed and habituated
Our vision of the good life is subconsciously formed and habituated, rather than cognitively or deliberately chosen. It is almost certainly not the “right answer” that we would give if asked, not due to duplicity on our part, but because we are not primarily thinking-things [2]. A whole lot more is going on under the surface than we realise.
Formation and habituation is happening all the time. We are constantly awash in culture’s stories; stories about who we should be and how we should act, who we should like or what we should think. We are so often unaware of our inner hum because the competition between these stories is so loud. Add to this the things we actually do (like our habits) which further embed these stories deep within us.
Simply put: Everything we do is also doing something to us.
I recently had a flirtation with some deeply overpriced, brightly coloured, skillfully marketed sneakers. Without my explicit permission, the marketers had strung me along a story which tapped into my desires (aesthetic enjoyment, proximity to cultural exclusivity, being ahead of the curve, etc.). I found myself waking to my alarm at 3am for a race with other would-be acquirers to get a pair of size 11s through the online cart checkout before the deliberately restricted supply was exhausted. I hadn’t given a thought to any rational reason for purchase, other than my current casual shoes are old - I was swept up in it. I gave up sleep and was willing to give up money (ultimately I did not win the cart race) to participate in a cultural story. (Evidently for me the good life includes giving alms to a mega-corporation and rising to keep a night vigil in exchange for sneakers that others of lesser devotion can’t have.)
What’s happening here? A story has promised me fulfilment and to move me closer to living the good life, and then I had habituated and reinforced this desire by rising in the night, injecting adrenaline into my system as I logged on and participated (unsuccessfully) in the highly successful marketing campaign.
This is a fun and illustrative example, but we as humans are doing this sort of thing all the time. It is shaping our ‘loves’.
The older we get, the less likely we are to do and think other than we do
Let me bring a sense of urgency to this discussion. The person you are and the person you are becoming is and will be the result of the millions of little choices you make each and every day [3]. This quote from Josh Porter is my favourite composition of an idea that I have read in the writing of C.S. Lewis, Dallas Willard and probably a host of others, which I first heard through the teaching of Living Wisdom [4].
Philosophers say that children begin life with something called Libertarian Freedom. The ability to do completely other than they are doing. The ability to change their conclusions, change their impression of the world, to change their mind. To respond to new ideas and new stimulus immediately. In comparison they describe adults as having Compatibilist Freedom. A recognition that over a lifetime of choices adults are less and less likely to think other than they do, and do other than they have done [5]. Formed over the course of a lifetime our habits of thought and action become entrenched and unlikely to change. Our ‘magnetic north’ becomes less and less likely to move from where it is.
This is a part of what makes lasting change so hard. To make lasting change means to go through a period of (often severe) disorientation before the new pattern ‘takes’; before the new begins to ‘feel’ natural and normal. To change our ‘loves’ we need to do more than chop off the top of the old ways of thinking by simply changing our behaviour. We must go down deep and dig out the root, the misbelief at the core of our thinking. Then deliberately and consistently direct our interior focus on the truth, as we habituate it within ourselves.
A crisis can be a true blessing
This is where a crisis can be a true blessing. A crisis acts to soften parts of our thinking that have become unchangeable and rigid. If we respond to it well, a crisis can wake us up to habits that are not serving us, to ways in which we have become malformed or formed toward things other than we realise. It can allow us to reorientate ourselves and our lives toward the truth.
My deep wish as a counsellor is to help people to achieve lasting change. If I can help in any way please get in touch.
Notes:
1. James K.A. Smith, Christian Philosopher and Saint Augustine scholar introduced me to this question through his cultural liturgy series; particularly Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom. Some of the ideas on habits discussed above are also from these works.
For a more technical (though still quite readable and generally accessible) analysis of The Good Life and its place in modern identity formation see The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor.
2. It is only as recently as the 17th century that the idea was birthed that we (as humans) are primarily ‘thinking-things’. Descartes introduced the view of humans as rational thinking-things, which inhabit a body. His famous dictum: Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is perhaps the most widely known philosophical development from the Rationalist period.
This Enlightenment development is beneath the assumption that the specific things that we mentally assent to or pronounce are the things that are true about us. Even though modern people consider themselves to be independent thinkers who ‘see things as they are’ it would be hard to overstate the degree to which we all live under the influence of slow and gradual encroachment of ideas of thinkers long past**. This doesn’t mean that ideas are necessarily wrong, just that they are highly influential and mostly invisible.
**This idea is something of a half quote from John Maynard Keynes. The full quote is as follows:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas”
(Keynes, J: The general theory of employment, interest and money (1936), as cited in Willard, D. (2014). The divine conspiracy : rediscovering our hidden life in God. William Collins.)
3. Porter, J. (n.d.). (Do Not) Do What You Want, Pt. Ii. Fighting the World, the Flesh, and the Devil: . Retrieved April 27, 2023, from https://vancity.church/teaching/fighting-the-world-the-flesh-and-the-devil/do-not-do-what-you-want-pt-ii/.
4. Living Wisdom: “You are the artist and you are the canvas, and you compose yourself by your choices.”
5. Porter, J. (n.d.). (Do Not) Do What You Want, Pt. Ii. Fighting the World, the Flesh, and the Devil: . Retrieved April 27, 2023, from https://vancity.church/teaching/fighting-the-world-the-flesh-and-the-devil/do-not-do-what-you-want-pt-ii/.
If this has brought to mind anything that you would like to talk through or have help with please get in touch. Either choose a time or send an email via the contact form.
Sources of ideas and stories are acknowledged when used significantly unchanged. Underlying mental health concepts are from the Living Wisdom approach to Pastoral Counselling.