The riverbank makes the river
People tell me I am too structured. That I put up too many rules. That my goals are too rigid and that I am being hard on myself. All of this is true. That being said, I’d like the opportunity to defend myself.
Unlimited freedom is oppression. Too many possibilities collapses your possibilities. You cannot escape the grooves carved into your brain, your neurons will always fire along familiar paths. Constraints around freedom, paradoxically, enhance freedom. The riverbank makes the river.
It bears mentioning: healthy constraints require acceptance, not rejection, of who you are. If the constraints you place are onerous (“I will not eat today”) and come from a place of malice (“because I do not deserve food”) they are a form of self-mutilation. Conversely, a good constraint is at the edge of reasonable and springs forth from a place of self-acceptance. Placing constraints which make you freer is an art which, for me, is a 4 step process: notice, accept, constrain, refine.
Distraction is ubiquitous, bottomless and weaponized against you (see: social media). Given this fact, to notice takes concerted effort and requires time and practice. It takes repeated experience to derive some lesson but repeated experience does not guarantee a lesson.
Noticing, at least in the manner I am speaking of here, is one of a collection of intensely human endeavors which, in its mysticism, evades strict definition but can be easily understood through example. A behavior which comes naturally to you seems to no longer serve you and demands a negative constraint (a push, e.g. stop dating assholes). A yearning in your soul beckons you and demands a positive constraint (a pull, e.g. run a marathon). You’ll know you’ve noticed something that needs constraining when you feel the bodily fear. Though the will requires it of us, in our earthly hearts, none want change.
Once you have noticed, you need to accept what you’ve noticed. To borrow from a favorite modern writer of mine, Henrik Karlsson: when I accept myself just as I am, I change. If I first set a constraint from a place of love, “part of me is this way, it is beautiful in its own way but it is not who I am becoming” I can place better restrictions than if I begin from a place of shame or guilt, “I am like this and I shouldn’t be.” I have found this to be true time and time again: jumping to restriction without acceptance leads you down a spiral of that same shame and guilt which keeps you trapped in that same pattern.
At times, you have to try something on to know if it is ill-suited for you. It may be necessary to place the restriction before accepting yourself in the same way that it is necessary for a scientist to experiment before fully understanding. However, acknowledging where this restriction is coming from helps to make the process a bit easier. If you know that you are deeply ashamed of some action which needs constraining, then you can catch yourself being overly harsh in setting that constraint.
The next step is a simple but also evades a succinct definition: set some constraint. This constraint can be a goal (e.g. write every day for a week) or it can be a real restriction (e.g. don’t use your phone before bed) but it’s important that it has some end-date to check in with yourself. Set this end-date to be no longer than 2 weeks.
If you notice the constraint you placed isn’t working you have two options: either forget it or refine it. Dropping constraints is completely acceptable since, usually, if it’s important it will come up again. What a liberating thought that has been for me. Refining the constraint takes looping back through the whole process again to see if it’s truly a worthy use of energy and seeing how you might adjust your approach.
You’ll know the constraint you set is a good one if it is on the edge of reasonable, you feel good about yourself after having accomplished it, and it narrows your possibilities while extending your freedom of movement: fewer places for the river to go but closer to where its meant to arrive.
I’ll close by briefly mentioning that Being a person is a messy process. Demanding change of yourself while loving yourself is a paradox which I have never managed to fully resolve: you are sure to find a shard of violence in even the purest intentions. As a growth-oriented person, I haven’t found a way of Becoming without this shard of violence directed against myself. It is perhaps this shard that people are noticing when they comment on my needless structuring.
Pressure makes diamonds, but it also makes earthquakes, only you can tell the difference.