Thoreau's Cabin. Part II: Contentment v. Compulsion

The spontaneous mindset brings contentment, while the fruit of haste is compulsion. As a kid, walking back from the hills to our holiday farmhouse, I felt a sense of contentment that had nothing to do with achieving anything or upregulating my self-esteem. It was a natural state of being, like when you push your chair away from the table having finished a good meal with great friends. All feels right with the world and it’s not much more complicated than that.

But there is not a whole lot of satisfaction and joy to be squeezed out of the haste-based regime we seem to live under. And yet, we crave a deep satisfaction or at least a strong experience, and it is frustrating when we go too long without getting one. We need something to hit that spot, and an experience that has a big charge to it without being profoundly satisfying may just have to do. Compulsion is a high energy hit that promises more than it can deliver in terms of cosmic peace and ecstatic union but it does give you a rise.

These usual suspect compulsions are the stigmatized ones, like compulsive sex, drugs, over (or under) eating, gambling and so on, each of which comes with its own treatment program. Other compulsions, like being a dedicated consumer or thinking non-stop when you might be at your ease, are more socially smiled upon and are not always thought of as problems. Either way though, they all function as a safety valve to the tightly wound haste mindset. If  in the spontaneous state you feel delight at a sunset or a flock of birds, for the haste mindset it would have to be a beer, a joint, a slice of chocolate cake, a something, at the end of a shitty day so you don’t have to feel what you’re feeling. Meister Eckhart, the 14th century mystic put it this way, “God and God’s will are one. I and my will are two.” A split will can never reach wholeness, and without some degree of wholeness, the fun stops.

And so, having abandoned wholeness but in need of a fairly regular high energy feeding, we find that even the stupidest compulsion makes genuine sense. It’s not that we believe that stuffing our faces with sweet gooey stuff will be transformational or that getting drunk tonight is a genius idea why didn’t I think of that before, it’s just a matter of simple math. Zero plus something beats zero plus zero. If we are sitting in the dark and we have to suffer, most of the time we can put up with it, but if we are sitting in the dark and there is some sort of solace close at hand, however meagre it is, it’s hard to say no.  

We will need our compulsions, even the embarrassing ones, until we can decommission enough of the haste mentality to start getting more of our nourishment from spontaneity/contentment. An old song by the doo-wop soul group the Persuasions says, “Stop, look, listen to your heart, hear what it’s saying.” If we can do that we may notice that the party was going on around us all the time. Examine your fingers. Pretty, aren’t they? Look more closely at the sidewalk, the wall, and all the other little sensory things. With a full heart, and so long as the conditions around me are not actually threatening or dangerous, life itself is just fun.

For generations now we have trained our brains into the haste mindset with a billion traffic lights, traffic jams, timelines, assembly lines, and deadlines. We are living out the lives of quiet desperation that Thoreau said most of us would. If we don’t like that, it’s on us to make an effort to get out of haste/compulsion and into the spontaneity/contentment world. Better if we could live lives of quiet inspiration.

Culturally, collectively, we have built so many glittering palaces and roared down so many asphalt roads that it will not be easy for us to slow down now. But we are all free to make our contribution to the project of disenchanting ourselves from this haste bullshit. In the wise words of Timothy Leary, we can start to turn on, tune in and drop out. Turn on to the original spontaneous way of being, tune in to the simple, sensory world around us, and drop out of the joy-abandoning haste mentality. Then we can feel like we belong here.