When’s the last time you did something for yourself?
When’s the last time that you indulged?
Indulged not in the sense of giving in to an impulse, succumbing to an urge––indulged in the sense that you let yourself follow exactly where your intentions led you.
Indulged in the sense that you let your sentences run on, not necessarily concerned with the meaning.
Indulged in the sense that you weren’t thinking about an audience.
This shit is all easy for me, in a way. It’s the easiest thing in the world! All you need to do is stop caring––the ultimate indulgence.
Indulge in the sense that you delete the previous line.
It’s not desire leading you, it’s your whims. Desires are broad and long, they stretch between points and connect things together. Whims are fleeting, they only point in one direction, they simply get you started. This seems like some kind of secret, that most the time, all you have to do is get started. Much of life is determined by the degree to which you can indulge your whims. The more freedom one has, the harder it is to identify and understand one’s whims, but the less freedom, the harder it is to act upon them.
Whims don’t matter. Desire matters. That’s why it’s fraught. This is not to diminish desire, but to understand it as a part of life, perhaps the most important part, but still just a part. Every feeling, every impulse, every part of the human condition deserves a certain amount of reverence, from love to the feeling of having something stuck in your eye and not being able to get it out. In a way, whims are the building blocks of many of the broader, deeper feelings of life. One starts with a whim––“Let me text her,” “Why shouldn’t I go to the show?” “Let me open this book”––and follows it where it leads.
For me, it is often harder to identify these whims than it is to act upon them (spoiled as a child) (one always falls on one side or the other). I move through life doing not what my whims might tell me, but doing what the circumstances tell me.
The circumstances! There is no force more oppressive. “He was a product of his circumstances”––who would ever want to hear this? Circumstances, after all, must be overcome! If the stuff of human life––the internal life––deserves inordinate respect, to what do we owe the circumstances but scorn.
This is all obviously unfair, as there is no man without the world, and from the world is derived all reason to live. And yet I feel this sharp anger towards a world that so often prevents one from acting on one's whims.
I’m tired! Goodnight!