(no subject)

[valancystirling]

And anyway, while we're on the subject--okay, we're not actually--how do you decide your priorities and what you care about in life? How do you just FIGURE OUT what things are most important to you and what is valuable?

I mean, really. How do you KNOW?

Some things are really nice on a somewhat superficial level, and you might be drawn to them or inclined to construct your life around those things. But sometimes I wonder if you're really supposed to be entirely comfortable all the time, and that some of the best and most important things in life are a pain in the ass sometimes, but ultimately worth far more than the really nice things that lure you with their surface niceness.

Example.

I would really love some ice cream right now. A gigantic lemon ice cream cone, in fact. With SPRINKLES, even. And if I didn't live in the land of no-lemon-ice-cream, I could easily get it. I might even settle for chocolate chip ice cream. Regardless, I can get ice cream with little effort, and it would be GOOD. And I would enjoy it, and the world would seem like a happy place.

But then I would get really fat and get that sugar rush feeling, and feel guilty, and ultimately, it wouldn't be worth that momentary bit of bliss.

I don't feel especially wild and passionate over the idea of spinach right now. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE spinach and have all kinds of spinach-related fantasies, but somehow it just doesn't seem very exciting to me right now. Not when there's ICE CREAM to be had.

But if I skipped the ice cream and went for the spinach...I'd feel healthier, less guilty, and would remember how much I love spinach. And in the long run, my life might be better because I chose spinach over ice cream, especially if I made the same choice frequently. Long term, it is definitely the best choice.

Okay, wow, I am dazed and don't know how I got here. I think I was trying to create some kind of food-related analogy for some philosophical idea. I do that too much. Anyway, so I have no idea if I achieved my objective, or what the objective was. Maybe I should just post and stop writing now.

Comments

[room342.livejournal.com]

Oh! My aunt- the one that knits (hobby) and makes stained glass (business), loves lemon ice cream. She also looks for mandarin and passion fruit, which they have in Mexico.

[valancystirling.livejournal.com]

Lemon ice cream is unheard of here. Several places I've gotten "Oh, you mean lemon sherbet?"

NO NO NO NO NO

Blue Bell makes lemon.

[acheron-hades.livejournal.com]

I think this is actually a very important question/problem, and it's one I've been discussing with some other people recently..

Experimentation helps, but it's not always easy to separate out what it is about a situation or activity that makes it pleasant or unpleasant - some stuff really aggravates when I'm depressed that doesn't cause me any problems when I'm feeling OK (on the odd occasions that happens). And I often do stuff when I'm feeling OK that I look back on when depressed and think "WTF?" (I'm wondering if I'm sometimes a little on the manic spectrum).

There seems to be a lot of stuff in most mystical / spiritual traditions about ascertaining one's true nature and desires. I tend to think of the "personality" as collection of habits, behaviours and ideas that accumulate over time, and obscure what's underneath. When I'm depressed there's less energy available to "run" my personality, which seems to kick me into thinking about what really is important.

I've been through quite a few iterations of that cycle and seem to have discovered that there isn't anything - or rather, anything I can define easily. That's why you've probably noticed a lot more posts of a spiritual / religious bent recently. I've tried lots of things to rid me of "the itch I can't scratch" (or as Morpheus put it, the splinter in my mind, driving me mad), no joy. Distractions help, but only for a bit - definitely only a band-aid.

This is the sort of thing I was trying to sort out in my Egos and happiness (http://www.livejournal.com/users/acheron_hades/39074.html#cutid1) post, though doubtless rather incoherently. I have a process for posing questions to my inner / deeper self, which basically involves trying to hold off on purely intellectual judgements (including my own 'fossilized' ideas of what I do and don't like) and see how I feel something, often by imagining it. The problem is, there seem to be different "bits" of me, and it's not always clear which bit an answer comes from.

To reverse your analogy, I try to do the same for food and health stuff. I don't come up with systematic diets, I try to just ask my body what it wants.. unfortunately, when I'm down, I feel like lots of rich, flavoursome stuff, as distraction I think, but when I'm feeling up and reasonably fit I find that I actually don't feel like eating so much, and what I do want seems to be healthier. Ditto with exercise, if I can just get started at all, I seem to start to want to do it without having to force myself (and I try to avoid forcing myself, seems like a good way to damage things, as well as stressing me out)

I've found a lot of the stuff on the Mysticism in World Religion (http://www.digiserve.com/mystic/) site useful recently, particularly the "surrendering" stuff.

[valancystirling.livejournal.com]

There seems to be a lot of stuff in most mystical / spiritual traditions about ascertaining one's true nature and desires. I tend to think of the "personality" as collection of habits, behaviours and ideas that accumulate over time, and obscure what's underneath. When I'm depressed there's less energy available to "run" my personality, which seems to kick me into thinking about what really is important.


Wow, I have NEVER thought of it that way. This is like a lightning bolt.

The problem is, there seem to be different "bits" of me, and it's not always clear which bit an answer comes from.
This I can definitely relate to.

I'll have a look at that Mysticysm page. Thanks for pointing it out.

[acheron-hades.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of the "personality" as collection of habits, behaviours and ideas that accumulate over time, and obscure what's underneath. When I'm depressed there's less energy available to "run" my personality, which seems to kick me into thinking about what really is important.

Wow, I have NEVER thought of it that way. This is like a lightning bolt.

Well, it took me 26 years to come up with it :) It explains why I seem to cycle, though - as soon as I get my energy back I fall back into doing the same old stuff, which isn't really making me happy, just distracting me, and gradually my underlying unhappiness builds up until it breaks through. (And I then I think what happens is that my body starts to feel physically ill (http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/depression.html) and I get "stuck" at the bottom of the pit. Not nice).

BTW, A H Almaas (http://www.ridhwan.org/almaas.html) has been recommended to me as a good source of writings on the ego, self, and "work on one's self" - but he's written so many books I haven't figured which one to start with yet :) Oh, and this entry (http://www.livejournal.com/users/catdraco/113051.html) by catdraco has some neat ideas in it, too..