The Journey Of A Lifetime

I’m in a somewhat philosophical mood this morning, partly because of some reflections over events of the weekend just behind us, and partly because anything too political will push my blood pressure past four figures. (I can’t write unceasingly about political subjects. It’s been slowly but steadily boiling all the happy bits right out of my brain.) So forgive me, Gentle Reader, if you find the following disconnected from your mundane concerns. I assure you, it connects quite well to mine.

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A question I’ve recently tried to keep continuously in mind, which I commend to all of you, is:

“Why are you doing this particular thing at this particular moment?”

Much of what any individual does is habit-based. The habit in question might be an important one, perhaps even a survival imperative. Nevertheless, habitual actions are undertaken automatically, nearly always without thought. It refreshes one to remember the whys of such actions; it makes them seem less mechanical and more purposeful.

Many of one’s remaining decisions and consequent actions arise from an aversion of some sort. To be more precise, we think of something to do – something that might get us nearer to some goal – and immediately find ourselves thinking of the negative aspects. In many cases, we turn aside from the action we’d thought to take – and in many of those cases, the deep reason is time preference.

In the simplest terms, we value a near-term reward over a long-term reward when the two are nominally equal. A dollar put in one’s today beats a dollar to be delivered tomorrow. Indeed, we value a dollar in hand today above a dollar and some cents tomorrow. There are several reasons:

• Gratification of desire is difficult to defer;
• Promised rewards sometimes fail to materialize;
• An asset currently in hand can often be used to generate a greater reward than what one was promised in return for one’s patience;
• If further investment, whether of time, money, or effort, is required to win the promised reward, those things have their own costs, both materially and in opportunities forgone.

The struggle to overcome our time preferences is summarized by a lapel button I once saw:

Hard work pays off tomorrow;
Laziness pays off today.

It also explains Americans’ willingness to finance current consumption with long-term indebtedness.

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Before the weekend, I had promised myself that I’d get some work done on Statesman, the sequel to Polymath. (Regarding which, I could still use reviews. Hint! Hint!) Well, to cut straight to the chase, I didn’t. What stopped me wasn’t an overload of more urgent tasks; it was time preference. It takes me about a year to turn out a novel. I can’t confront that extensive an effort without being beset by reluctance to begin, no matter how ardently I want to see the book finished. This past weekend I simply needed more get-up-and-go than I possessed to set to work on a project whose completion is so far away.

You’d think a writer with nine novels already out would have conquered that hill by now, wouldn’t you? Yet that “potential well” of reluctance has grown deeper with each completed book, because I know how much effort and suffering another one will cost me. This past weekend, a little immediate gratification from a quick short story seemed far more appealing. In case you haven’t already noticed, here’s what resulted.

My case is surely not unique. Only a writer of absolute and unfailing discipline is unaffected by this problem. And of course, it’s not confined to writers. The dissuasive power of time preference afflicts us all.

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In Freedom’s Scion, at a critical juncture for Althea’s emotional development, she has the following exchange with her “dead” grandfather Armand:

     Grandpere! It’s been—
     —Nearly two years. I know, I know. You needed the time to yourself. Never fear, I’d have been there if you ever really needed me.
     (grimly) I had plenty of needs!
     —Nothing you were unable to handle by yourself, dear.
     And you knew that...how?
     —I know you.
     It halted her in mid-flight.
     My self-imposed exile wasn’t for any particular purpose. Maybe it served one even so.
     —No maybes about it, Al. You are not who or what you were. You’re far more. Some of it is invisible to you yet, though it won’t be forever. Just one of the unacknowledged laws of human nature at work.
     Which is?
     —At every moment of your life, you are everything you have ever been. It’s all there, from the instant of your birth onward to this very moment. And it all plays a part.
     Even the pain?
     —Especially the pain.

That “unacknowledged law of human nature” is more frequently overlooked than observed and respected. (Why, we might even call it “obvious!”) It has a clear application to our relations with others, but what I have in mind this morning is how it affects our preconceptions and decisions about our own lives.

What we “know” is really more often than not what we “have known:” i.e., what we have experienced in times past. We did this and then that happened. Sometimes we infer causal relations from those sequences of events. Sometimes our inferences are correct, and sometimes we’re merely being superstitious. Nevertheless, it’s the way the mind works: we associate our undertakings both with the rewards we got for them and with their costs in time, effort, and suffering.

However, there’s an important component that’s often left on memory’s “cutting room floor:” the pleasure of the moment.

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I’ve told my Gentle Readers on several occasions that I mostly write these pieces for myself, as a way of reasoning out my intuitions. It happens to be true; I did it before there was a World Wide Web, and I’m certain I’d continue to do it if the Web were to be shut down forever (shudder). This is just one more example of the practice.

What I’m going to try to do, when next I have time to work on Statesman or any other extended project, is to focus on the pleasure inherent in the instantaneous act of writing: the specific and immediate reward of getting the next scene, paragraph, sentence, or word exactly right. Narrowing my focus down to the very instant in which my fingers touch the keys might just be enough, not to “overcome” my awareness of the pain and struggle that lies before me, but to forget about it entirely for as long as I write.

After all, I can hardly argue with Armand; he’s a planetary Overmind. According to him, at every moment of my life I’m everything I’ve ever been. If so, then each moment is the culmination of my life’s journey up to that moment. In some sense, it’s why I’ve lived – why I’ve done everything I’ve ever done.

Note how this perspective differs from the typical “life is a journey” platitude: you don’t have a finish line to reach before it can be significant. You’re standing at a “finish line” at every instant of your life. That you can’t always hear the roar of millions of adoring fans is of infinitely less importance.

That makes it a pretty important moment, one that deserves my full attention...and my full powers of enjoyment. I’ll try hard not to waste it.