A Question

The time is right, for a musing. A musing for amusing myself, and a pain to all those who are reading this. The subject of today's musing is motivation, a topic brought up by my dear friend Eugenia who broached the subject of why certain people have it, and why others, well, don't.

My instinct was to look inside myself for the answer. (A rather biased view, but it saves me the trouble of having to justify what I can claim to be mere opinions.) Why am I so fiercely motivated at times, and why am I so strangely placid at other times? I found my answer rather quickly - I am but an emotional animal, chained and dragged by my whimsical feelings. Something beyond my control, it seems.

I felt pretty satisfied with my answer, but something continued to irk me, and it took me longer than I should to figure out why. How can something (my emotions), whose origins lie within me, be outside my influence? My ever-relentlessly-self-contradicting self came up with another question in answer to that: by whose law am I supposed to be able to control things that originate within me? I grow nails, and I digest my sushi which I had for lunch, but I am as successful in controlling them as I am in controlling the weather.

Alas, it seems, and I can see why my life is a mini-tragedy of sorts. It is depressing enough that there's things out there that I can do absolutely nothing about; it is absolutely terrifying that I am a slave to the very vessel that I am in! It tells me how to feel, and with my genetic material, I was destined to look this way no matter what!

I looked around desperately for a way out, and it seemed that there might be some hope for me in Buddhist teachings. The way in seems to be the way out. A rigorous journey into the within might bring me closer to the bigger meaning that I am too small to comprehend.

To be continued......