Time Capsule #184
A return to the Self.
Dear reader,
I hope you are having a good day!
The newsletter is so back.
No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
—Thomas De Quincey
✏️ First Things & Second Things
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.
Søren Kierkegaard
I simultaneously believe these two seemingly mutually exclusive things to be true:
It is possible to attain anything in life, should you chase it with enough fervor.
If you want something too badly it will not come to you.
This can be observed in all ages and stages of life: the child who “wants to make friends” so badly that they just can’t seem to find any, or the ambitious youth chasing “success” with such relentlessness that they unconsciously pass it by. I suspect that this over-identification with and pursuit of the external leads to an incongruence with one’s self such that you are unlikely to achieve what is desired in the proper fashion.
For every man is primitively planned to be a self, appointed to become oneself; and while it is true that every self as such is angular, the logical consequence of this merely is that it has to be polished, not that it has to be ground smooth, not that for fear of men it has to give up entirely being itself, nor even that for fear of men it dare not be itself in its essential accidentality (which precisely is what should not be ground away), by which in fine it is itself. But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by “the others.” By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of worldly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself, forgets what his name is (in the divine understanding of it), does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.
Søren Kierkegaard
Anthony Storr describes something similar in the typical “mid-life crisis” patient:
When I was a psychotherapist in practice, I sometimes adopted an approach derived from this technique [active imagination] with middle-aged patients suffering from depression. Such patients are often people who, because of the demands of their careers and families, have neglected or abandoned pursuits and interests which, at an earlier point in time, gave life zest and meaning. If the patient is encouraged to recall what made life meaningful to him in adolescence, he will begin to rediscover neglected sides of himself, and perhaps turn once again to music, or to painting, or to some other cultural or intellectual pursuit which once enthralled him, but which the pressures of life’s business had made him abandon.
Anthony Storr
I suspect the answer to such issues is to put the first things first. You must put yourself first — if you are to bring the most present and high version of yourself to your work, your relationships, your community, and the personal endeavours which give your life meaning. It feels increasingly hard to do in the face of growing responsibilities and expectations, fears and external pressures. But there is no greater failure than a failure to oneself: if you fail to put the first things first, you might and up losing both the first and second things.
dies reveniet.
the day will come again.
💡 Food for Thought
Humiliations give you humility.
🔗 Sunday Best
Luke O’Nien on the High Performance Podcast
I found this to be a great discussion on leadership and high-performance — and why form/excellence in one’s work is not merely a function of hard-work, but of mindset.
You do your best work when you do it freely and without pressure, perceived or otherwise.
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
Yours Truly,
AT