On starting over (and over, and over, and over)

One of the keys to survival is pattern recognition. Without it, our ancestors never would have noticed that striking two rocks together usually starts a fire, summer follows spring or that the red berries taste like burning. While we can debate the validity of inductive reasoning until the cows come home - if they come home - I think we'd all agree that it's a pretty useful guide to our every day lives. Lately, I've noticed some patterns in my own behavior that may hold the key to my future survival. Or may be good for some cheap laughs. We'll see.

Disclaimer: Discussing this man may make Heather cry

I like to start over. It's something I do frequently, about every two years or so. It usually starts with me taking a fairly critical look at what I've managed to do - usually not much - and becoming righteously disappointed with myself. What's the matter with you my inner nag begins, Weren't you have supposed to have written a novel by now, or travelled to Europe, or discovered gunpowder or gotten a real job? This simply won't do at all . And then in an orgy of flagellation I take stock of my mediocre sins.

Over the years, the usual offenders wind up being smoking too much or still smoking at all, in a job/ jobs I don't really enjoy, not writing enough or everything I write is superficial, uncertain of the status of the relationship I'm currently in, not working out or not working out enough, not eating well, and trying to live beyond my means through the modern miracle of credit cards. The next step in this process is trying to ward off the gods of failure by making them impossible promises that they know I won't be able to keep. Wait! I think to myself I know what the solution is! If all of these things are wrong with me, then all I have to do is simply change absolutely everything right away. After all, that shouldn't be too hard, should it? And then the gods laugh.

By setting up an impossible challenge for myself, I guarantee failure. By demanding perfection from myself all at once, failure in even one of these areas completely invalidates any gains I make in the others. Feeling like a total failure, I then indulge my minor vices even more so. This results in my feeling to be even more of a failure as I've now become a failure and a recidivist - the logic being that it's worse to try and fail then to not try at all.

I've been wondering why I do this, and what I think the problem may be that I'm actually scared of succeeding. If I just focused on succeeding at one thing, why, that would mean that it would be possible for me to succeed at my other problems providing I don't demand instant perfection and realise that -gasp- self improvement is a gradual process that takes many years of hard struggle and can't be achieved instantaneously or by quick fixes. It would mean that the game is harder than I thought, but if I play it sanely I have a better chance of winning, or at least getting a little closer to the goal.

As I see it, the problem lies in the fact that I want to be perfect at something right away. If it requires too much effort - and the way I do it, it usually does - then I get frustrated and give up. But the beauty of it is by giving up after over-extending myself everything stays exactly the same.I don't get challenged, and everything remains as it is. There's a certain comfort in total inertia. It's familiar. Dull but familiar. Which is very attractive to me.

One character trait that I have is my maybe excessive enjoyment of the familiar. I don't really like change. Once I've acclimated myself to whatever the emotional/social landscape is, my innate preference is for everything to remain static. Oh, things can happen of course. Just as long as they don't interrupt the overall sense of continuity and tradition that I crave. In fact, one of the pleasures that I take from reading books of history - or watching Rome - is the sense of continuity it gives me. The dark side to this trait is that if I think something has to change, then everything has to change. Like Chesterton's free-thinker and "revolutionise", change becomes an intransitive verb.

The obvious answer to all of this is that I should just stop being so hard on myself and admit that I'm not perfect. Not even close, and that I should stop lacerating myself with guilt because I'm not the exact mirror image of who I want to be. I think any one who knows me well enough has given me some variation on this advice over the years. It's very hard advice to act on, as over the years I've sharpened my capacity for self-criticism to a killing edge. It's also one of those things that's as natural as breathing to me. The most significant problem with that advice is that it requires me to change.

If life is largely about missing out and missing the point, why does it bother me so much that I do? Maybe it's just vanity, ultimately. A childish wish to be good at everything, regardless of whether or not I actually consider "everything" to be worthwhile. Maybe from now I'll just focus on what I want to get better at, and stop worrying so much over whether it'll eventually constitute perfection.