A Foolish Consistency

When we think about our lives, we think about the big events. The weddings, crucial conversations or turning points in our lives when we can define a ‘before’ and ‘after’. These events loom large because it helps our narrative-producing brains put our existence in context, a story about what our lives mean and what we’re about. Even day-to-day, we tend to take a very coarse grained view of it, picking out the few things that went particularly well or not and making a judgement based on that. Behavioral economists distinguish between the ‘experiencing’ and ‘remembered’ selves; the remembered self tends to measure our lives by these bigger events.

But the truth is that life is only ever actually lived in the experiencing self, in the fleeting, innumerable moments in between big events. Eckhart Tolle called it the “Eternal Now”, each instant shedding itself as a new one arises. The future - our projections and predictions about what will happen - and the past - our memories and stories about who we are - exist solely in our head as phantasmagorias. It is easy to lose sight of this, especially when we project these big events forward in the form of a goal.

Goals can loom large in the mind, because subtle expectations about the sort of person we should be now are embedded in the goal. If I project a healthy, fit Hoysted into the future then present Hoysted better get off his ass and train. And if I don’t (as I’m not today), then the gap between present and future can provoke anxiety. In these moments, a modest consistency for the experiencing self can save us. The genius of giga-bestseller Atomic Habits was identifying our tendency to put the horse before the cart, and show that audacious goals were built in the tiny moments between the big ones. In other words, small actions in the present will allow the future to take care of itself.

The impediment to progress is action. The obstacle is the way. This is the fundamental flaw in exhortations to do what you’re passionate about; we start to think about what we’re passionate about, rather than simply defining it through action. No wonder so many of us procrastinate. If we do something, even imperfectly, then we’re opening ourselves up to the possibility that our projected self will fall short of our hopes. Procrastination is not a moral failure, but an emotional one, the mask our fear wears because we’re afraid of what action entails - consequences, and the reality of working on our goals. So be gentle with yourself while you build that habit of going to the gym.

Procrastination is not what it seems. What looks from the outside like our delay; our lack of commitment; even our laziness may have more to do with a slow, necessary ripening through time and a central struggle with the core realities of any endeavor to which we have set our minds. To hate our procrastinating tendencies is in some way to hate our relationship with time itself, to be unequal to the phenomenology of revelation and the way it works its own quiet way in its very own seasonal and gifted time, only emerging when the very qualities it represents have a firm correspondence in our necessarily struggling heart and imagination.

- David Whyte

I’m proud of the consistency I’ve achieved with my substack. Somehow I manage to shake off my lazier tendencies and put something out each week I think has some value. But I also need to open myself up to the reality of what I make here, and what I want to make is slowly changing with me.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” urged Emerson in his ageless masterpiece Self Reliance, and I’ve been thinking about it often lately. I’ve spent over a year developing a consistent writing habit, partly just to prove that I could do it, and now it feels like it’s gestating into its own thing. I’ve been procrastinating on what that might be, afraid to change what I’ve built here wholesale. But consistency, like any philosophy, requires a balance between being consistent on things that are really important, but not being a slave to it. My writing’s changed. I’ve changed.

Normalwise was always going to be consolations on philosophy, a dispatch from my small vantage in the universe on what a good life seemed to entail. It feels a little too schoolmaster for me now, though, a pedestal to preach from rather than a ticket in the cheap seats - and I belong in the cheap seats, where I’ve parked myself to hurl my perspective at you every Sunday. I luxuriate in my limitations, as a very ordinary guy who enjoys pulling the threads of his week together for you. Writing this is a brilliant habit that I want to evolve, and it seems to have expanded past my humble Normalwise.

So next week I’ll have something a bit new for you. Nothing drastic. You’ll still recognise me, maybe with a new haircut and ideas for the future. I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.