How do you consciously link the person you are now to the person you will become in the future?
The first step is to recognize that you are a complex creature made up of many parts. Although you go by your own name and you have one birth date and one set of fingerprints, you are comprised of several internal personalities that together make you the person that you are. You embody various personalities including, for example, the results-minded career person, the whimsical rebel, the caring provider, the gregarious socialite, the reclusive hermit, and many others.
You are not a single entity but rather an ecosystem of many entities.
Each one of your internal entities has its own life to live, its own needs, its own desires and fears and quirks. Each one wants to be part of your daily activities. Some of the personalities are compatible with some of your other personalities, and some of them clash. For instance, if you are comprised of both the responsible breadwinner and the devil-may-care rebel, you will feel each of them pulling you in different directions. That tension will persist unless you can negotiate ways for them to agreeably co-exist inside you. You need to establish a sort of internal peace, a Pax Individualis, a version of your own e pluribus unum, your singular identity that emerges out of many.
Have you ever found yourself saying, “I feel like a slug. I really need to go to the gym,” and then for whatever reason you don’t go to the gym? That is a conversation involving your internal Athlete and your internal Sloth. Each of these entities wants different things. The Athlete wants to feel healthy and to look good in that new outfit you got. But the Sloth wants to just chill and watch videos of kittens doing agonizingly adorable things that only kittens do, usually involving yarn, never at the gym. When you decide to not go to the gym, the Sloth says, “Shut up, Athlete. We’re watching kitten videos now, and later we may move on to a podcast or maybe a TED Talk or whatever we may want to watch and, besides, it’s none of your damn business anyway. Being athletic is overrated. Get over yourself!”
In fact, not only do the Athlete and Sloth inside you want different things, they also pose a threat to each other’s existence. The more you devote your attention to one, the more you deprive the needs of the other.
When you see someone who is gripped by an obsesssion, you see someone whose life is overwhelmingly controlled by just one of their many internal personalities whose dominance is crowding out their other personalities.
This is no more obvious than in the eyes of an addict. The addict knows on some level that she is out of balance. Her intuition tells her that she should not be so single-mindedly preoccupied with the object of her addiction. And yet she shuts out that intuition. She is a slave to her fixation, driven by its clarion call, spellbound and somnambulating towards its glow, remaining ever wanting, never quite satisfied. Her eyes show the desperation for the next fix. It is the desperation of her insatiability, and also the desperation crying out from the other aspects of her life that are being pushed down, crushed down, neglected and asphyxiated.
We all face choices. We all struggle with the questions about what to do with the time we have. We all have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week. And yet some people seem to have a lot more clarity of purpose than others. Why is that? Well, part of it is related to how they broker the territory occupied by each of their internal personalities.
Brokering a Pax Individualis is about balancing the power that is inside you.
Hang on a minute. I want to be very careful about the meaning of the phrase, “balancing the power that is inside you” in this context. Phrases like this are overused. They have been co-opted by diverse characters, from self-help pedagogues to spiritual gurus to manufacturers of internet memes and bumper stickers and, over time, phrases like “balancing the power that is inside you” tend to devolved into platitudes. In the current context, the phrase means how you distribute the focus of your attention.
So, working with the various personalities that make you who you are is about consciously choosing how you distribute the focus of your attention.
If you were to take a magnifying glass out into the sunlight, you could create a singular link by using the glass to focus the sunlight with such concentration that you scald an object and potentially even set it on fire. When I was a child I could spend hours delightfully burning leaves and twigs and the occasional unfortunate insect that had the misfortune of scurrying my way when I was outside looking for objects to scorch.
Your mind is no different. You can allow your mind to jump around from topic to topic while maintaining a diffuse collection of thoughts just as the sun broadly illuminates all objects in the vicinity. Alternatively, you can focus the attention of your mind on a singular thought while holding away all other thoughts. The power of this single-minded attention can be formidable. It can allow you to burn away all distracting elements of that topic and create pure mental clarity. Sometimes you may make a breakthrough discovery, or see the topic in a new way, or suddenly see it in a broader context, or realize that you have been focusing on the wrong topic altogether.
To be clear, what we’re discussing is a metal activity, an activity that unfolds in the landscape of your mind. The focus of your attention may involve real objects or places or people in the world around you, but the activity is within you.
When you concentrate your focus on what you will be in the future and how you will be in the context of your surroundings, this is an exercise in creative visualization. This can be very powerful as a way of providing mental clarity for the direction of your life.
When you visualize yourself in the future, that future version of yourself will have enjoyed greater development of certain characteristics than the present version of yourself. The link between the person you are now and that person you may become in the future is the development of certain entities that you already possess.
However, as noted above, you also embody certain internal entities that clash with other internal entities that are crying out for you to focus on them and develop them. Therefore, the link between the current you and the future you involves successfully horse-trading among the various clashing entities.
We will unpack this further in a future post.