Qualities / Dualities of the Willpower.

There are some people who struggle with discipline. Personally, I view it as something I have to do if I want to achieve something. It feels mandatory, alien, coming from an external authority. But willpower, for me, feels different; I feel it comes from a genuine desire within me. Once, while watching a Ted-Talk by Mariana Rojas Estapé (a Spanish psychiatrist and writer), it clicked in my head when, speaking about willpower, she stated that a person with willpower can go further than an intelligent person without it.

It made perfect sense to me. She talked about how we can achieve our goals by training our brains not to pursue immediate gratification but rather to postpone it by setting concrete goals and a more manageable process for achieving them, even when we face difficulties, distractions, or temptations most of the time.

But what happens when we achieve those goals? Rojas Estapé talked about chasing the garbage truck, but not about what to do when you reach it. Looking back, I realized the things I'd accomplished and remembered how hard it used to be to grasp them, to inhabit them. Could that be naturally human? The act of spending more time pursuing goals than giving ourselves enough space to recognize and enjoy them?

Fun fact, there will always be something more to accomplish out there. After achieving a desire, we seem to forget the point of achieving it. Curiously, this month, wandering through the bazaars of Mexico City, I came across a text by Schoppenhauer. I missed my city so much, it's worth mentioning. In the text, he said that the will is an impulse, an infinite force, the tragedy of life (because it incites the individual toward the achievement of successive goals. But none of them can provide permanent satisfaction). It's a bit like leaving the door open to live chasing and trying to close the window in time so that the satisfaction lasts longer. The activity of desiring keeps us suffering, in an endless loop of being born, desiring, failing or achieving, dissatisfied with something new, repeating the cycle. Judge me what you will, because I'm summarizing and expressing, in my very vulgar and ineloquent words, something as complex as any text by Schopenhauer, I think, is.

It reminded me a bit of the book I'd been finishing for months, classic... I don't finish one book and I'm already starting another, you see what I mean? The fact is that this book, Happiness and the Absurd, contains 10 essays by different authors, about Albert Camus's Sisyphus, a character from Greek mythology who was punished by the gods by pushing a huge rock to the top only to see it fall. An entire eternity condemned to arduous efforts for meaningless gain. Pushing a burden that's going to fall on him until he's exhausted, he knows it, and it's not like he can let himself die trying to free himself from it; he's already in the underworld. What would Sisyphus's will be there then? In the earthly, contemporary world, what resemblance does it have to meaninglessness, or what do we want to put our will to? What are the rocks we're willing to push even if they were to fall on us all the time for the rest of our days?

I like Camus's Sisyphus's absurdity; I like Rojas Estapé's hope, but I like Schoppenhauer's pessimism more. I find it more bearable to ask myself this question because it's more honest for me to answer: What are we willing to attempt with the guarantee of dissatisfaction? To what desires are we going to show our will? Contrary to the magical, "decretist," ritualistic, "zodiacal sign" theories that tell me to go for it. As if my faith or my own limited human strength or rituals could change such common external variables as the weather, the climate, health, social contexts. Or variables as complex as the existence of other humans, the order of the cosmos, or the existence of God himself. And it's not that I deny the existence of a power of co-creation with the universe, but for me that's pure occultism, something like the same old rhetoric about becoming your "own god" because God lives in you and in the universe.

God is God, I am me, his world is his world, and there's no getting around it. Of course, I'm willing to do the best I can in this world. It makes me laugh a lot because Schoppenhauer was an atheist, and yet, in the perception of this amateur and simple writer, he agrees with one of the greatest principles of the Christian faith: abandoning one's will or one's own strength (to rest in the will of God). Schoppenhauer recognizes that there is consolation in spirituality and faith; it helps sustain the order of a world like ours. He explains how terrible the human construct looks if we only explain it with rationality.

I agree with him that the ways to "alleviate" that pain of desiring and pursuing are art (or the act of aimless contemplation); compassion (teaching ourselves to feel with others); and finally, sinking into non-desire (surrendering to the idea of not desiring in order not to suffer).

Each person can draw their own conclusions; I like to play with them and among them. It's true that there's no point in suffering for what we won't achieve, but isn't this life worth all our will, to go through it and experience it? Not with the nice explanation that one day we'll find meaning in not achieving everything, but with the knowledge that it might not make sense to do so, and that way we'll be fine. The human experience is worth the will to live it, even if we know that at the end of it all, there's a big rock, or a death, or whatever falls first.