A Call to Do

If nothing is entirely good, then something is always lacking. If you go looking, you can always find may find reason to despair. C’est la vie. 

To compulsively focus on the negative is a problem—but how hollow a solution it is to say: “Focus on the positive!” Focus, awareness: these are but mental states—fleeting. The negative among us know the futility in this; attempts to change these states directly are but folly. That maintaining a positive mindset represents even one step out of the dreary valley: sheer naïveté! The sad man yearns to embrace positivity, but if he grasps at it directly, he will surely end up further back than where he started.

Optimism must be born out of action, and out of undeniable causation. And its robustness: from continued practice. If you knew you could make things happen—think of how easy it would be to focus on the positive!—but this knowledge can only come from acting. And so, optimism may only be obtained, or perhaps, better put, may only be maintained, through action and through causing.

But what can you really do? Wiggle your toes? Roll your eyes? Can you take to your feet? It can all feel so small. And perhaps, there isn’t as much under your control as you’d like to believe. Perhaps the need to feel in control is yet another compulsion. How dreary indeed.

We must then, be comfortable acting. And how violent it may seem—choosing one action and giving up all others in that moment. But surely we will be better for it—to have done something, to have had a chance at success; for having explored the realm of the possible; for having lived, if only for a moment.

It is a basic human need—to feel that one affects the world.

(Life is very long).

🦋