On the Question, “What are you avoiding?” (Pt. 1?)

(Enjoying vacation time with my Mom in Fredericksburg, Texas, and finding myself with extra free time on a hot, muggy Thursday afternoon. In the context of finishing reading “the Defining Decade” and beginning to wrestle with “Sickness unto Death” while away from home and work, i’m experiencing acute LUED - lazy, unhurried existential dread).

Outside of school, life doesn’t happen by itself - you decide to live according to your spoken or unspoken principles. Uncertainty is ever-present, but ultimately you decide how you respond to its presence. You can choose to work through that uncertainty, to work in spite of it, or to defer confronting it by distracting yourself.

I suppose my query here is really about the nature of distraction. With the best of intentions, someone once told me, “your devil is distraction.” (Have I written about this on the site before? It feels like a common refrain in understanding myself better). At this unedited moment in time, I take this to mean: with the right concentration and structure, you are capable of more than you know, but you are too easily deterred by your superficial involvement in many different things, rather than concentrated attention on one. This, at the same time as it feels especially challenging to multitask on several major projects at once.

But in a vacuum, how does one know if something has received appropriate concentrated attention? Hard work is not the same as effective work, and much time focused on one thing could be time better spent on a hundred projects of the same species (definitely relating back to the earliest posts here). Mentorship, or a community of older, more experienced people, could act as its own life-structure, helping one stay on a path and not stray too far. But where is the certainty that another’s age and experience have anything to do with helping one realize one’s true nature?

Are there things that can’t be confronted directly? Part of what I remember liking so much about Rilke’s writing (I haven’t visited it in a little while and might feel differently about it now) is how ephemeral and indirect, yet acute, it seems - like truth is found in examining thin air, rather than making pronouncements about solid ground. His Duino Elegies begin with the stanza:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?

and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.

(Translation by Stephen Mitchell)

I don’t pretend to know what Rilke means here, but in the past I’ve interpreted it as something like: the full truth is too powerful to bear. I take this as something akin to the Greek mythological belief that mortals would perish if they saw one of the gods in his or her true form.

Somehow this interpretation feels wrong and beside the point now. I didn’t intend to birng Rilke into this inquiry when I started writing just now, but I feel captivated by the above passage and somewhat glad that my thoughts on it are different from what they were a year ago.

What are you avoiding?

For starters, sitting with this question longer and unpacking it. Furthermore, trying to understand my motivation behind asking the question. Perhaps one antidote to the question could be some platitude like, “what’s one thing you could be doing right now?”

Spending quality time with loved ones. That surely is an end-in-itself.