The Committee

“It helps to resign as controller of your fate.” - Anne Lamott

"Sortes meae in manu Dei sunt." (My fate is in the hands of God) - Philippe Aries

Surrender is such a sweet word.  In my case, it's more of an aspiration than a reality.  Having spent much of my life as a foot soldier for international capitalism (French, not American, for the most part), vestiges of that mentality remain.  If you aren't a success working 8 hours a day, work 12.  If you are having trouble balancing your dwindling departmental budget and the long list of tasks required by management, just keep staring at the spreadsheet into the wee hours of the morning and surely a solution will come to you.  (If you are still in that world, I heartily recommend Bonjour Paresse by Corinne Maier.  Dilbert works, too.)

Powerful conditioning at work here and it was only after being slammed by two life-threatening events (alcoholism and cancer) that I began to see that there might be another way to approach life - an approach beautifully summarized by Reinhold Neibuhr's Serenity Prayer.  Yet finding the right balance between the things one can and cannot change (between acceptance and right action) is, well, tricky.   And it's the small everyday stuff that can tip one back into insanity - trying to control the uncontrollable and falling into the If-I-just-try-a-little-bit-harder trap.

The trap is there in every project, no matter how small.  Painting my front porch, for example.  Three days of poisonous chemicals, two days with the sander breathing dust and after five days of work,  looking at it and only seeing how imperfect it still is.  And if you think it's bad when I'm painting, believe me it's about a hundred times worse when I'm writing. 

The sign of incipient insanity (or how I know I'm channeling my inner control freak) is something I call The Committee and Ms. Lamott calls radio station KFKD.  I doubt I could better her description, so here goes:

"Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one's specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn't do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything one touches turns to shit, that one doesn't do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on."

I don't know about you but the part of me that loves to write, to dance with words, to play with ideas, just shrivels and dies in the din. Working harder or longer doesn't help here because the cacophony cannot be caged.  The more I say "I will", the more the voices in my head reply, "Really?  What makes you think that?"

At this point I think that you, my dear reader, have probably determined that I am either suffering from depression or writer's block.  Guilty as charged on both counts.  Or, to look at it another way, The Committee has taken over and it's direct democracy in there - everyone has an equal voice and nobody has anything worth saying.

How to restore order?  I don't.

The Committee derives its power using the classic tool of all dictatorships of the people - isolation.  To survive it must be a closed system where its tenets cannot be tested against another reality.  So instead of fighting the voices that want to make my world very small, I'm letting them deliberate in some dark corner of my mind while I go out and find other voices to listen to.

For me that means less writing, more reading.  Not with the intention of writing anything specific or of beating The Committee up with fresh ideas, but haphazardly - whatever takes my fancy at the moment which could be a steampunk romance novel, a classic of the Western Canon or (something I just discovered) fiscal sociology.

All good stuff.  Or at least I haven't read anything yet that I really regret having picked up. On the contrary, I'm finding some real gems (other perspectives) in unlikely places. What a pleasure it was to pick a book randomly off the shelf and discover a really fine essay by C.S. Lewis about why modern people should read ancient books.  I will leave you with a few of his words and I wish all of you a very restful Sunday.

"Every age has its own outlook.  It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.  We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characterstic mistakes of our own period.  And that means the old books.  All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook-even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.  Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny.  They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides might be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united - united with each other and against earlier and later ages - by a great mass of common assumptions...
None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.  Where they are true they will give us truth we half knew already.  Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.  The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds..."