An emotional education may require us to adopt two different starting points. For a start, how we are taught may matter inordinately because we have ingrained tendencies to shut our ears to all the major truths about our deeper selves. Our settled impulse is to blame anyone who lays our blind spots and insufficiencies bare, unless our defences have first been adroitly and seductively appeased. In the face of critically important insights, we get distracted, proud or fidgety. We may prefer to do almost anything other than take in information that could save us.
Moreover, we forget almost everything. Our memories are sieves, not robust buckets. What seemed a convincing call to action at 8 AM will be nothing more than a dim recollection by midday and an indecipherable contrail in our cloudy minds by evening. Our enthusiasms and resolutions can be counted upon to fade like the stars at dawn. Nothing much sticks.
It was the philosophers of ancient Greece who first identified these problems and described the structural deficiencies of our minds with a special term. They proposed that we suffer from akrasia, commonly translated as "weakness of will", a habit of not listening to what we accept should be heard and a failure to act upon what we know is right. It is because of akrasia that crucial information is frequently lodged in our minds without being active in them and it is because of akrasia that we often both understand what we should do and resolutely omit to do it.
Alain de Botton
The School of Life : An Emotional Education.
Tailpiece.
Got up a trifle late by a half past 5, went through the chores and was out of the house, for my walk, by a 5' past 6. Lekha had gone to the Mammiyoor Siva kshetram by about a half past 9. Are the auto rickshaw drivers, of our stand, resentful of the fact that we only call for either Hamid or Sijo, to run our errands?
The draft of Muthachhan's biography, in English, reached by speed post this morning for corrections. I've got three days to do it.
Moreover, we forget almost everything. Our memories are sieves, not robust buckets. What seemed a convincing call to action at 8 AM will be nothing more than a dim recollection by midday and an indecipherable contrail in our cloudy minds by evening. Our enthusiasms and resolutions can be counted upon to fade like the stars at dawn. Nothing much sticks.
It was the philosophers of ancient Greece who first identified these problems and described the structural deficiencies of our minds with a special term. They proposed that we suffer from akrasia, commonly translated as "weakness of will", a habit of not listening to what we accept should be heard and a failure to act upon what we know is right. It is because of akrasia that crucial information is frequently lodged in our minds without being active in them and it is because of akrasia that we often both understand what we should do and resolutely omit to do it.
Alain de Botton
The School of Life : An Emotional Education.
Tailpiece.
Got up a trifle late by a half past 5, went through the chores and was out of the house, for my walk, by a 5' past 6. Lekha had gone to the Mammiyoor Siva kshetram by about a half past 9. Are the auto rickshaw drivers, of our stand, resentful of the fact that we only call for either Hamid or Sijo, to run our errands?
The draft of Muthachhan's biography, in English, reached by speed post this morning for corrections. I've got three days to do it.
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