It took me awhile, but I finally figured out why my life has been such a mess. It can be tersely summarized with 8 letters:
A fool, noun (n.), as I understand the meaning, is someone who does not exercise the wisdom that similarly situated people are expected to have. This dearth in ability to make good judgments may be the result of naivete or imposed biological determinants limiting innate intelligence, cognitive functions or learning.
It isn't someone with a reasonable lack of wisdom or knowledge such as that we experience as ignorance and it also isn't the intentional ignorance people deliberately cultivate in order to rationalize or accept lazy or evil behaviors.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe my basic abilities and measures of intelligence or logical thinking are the source of my own foolishness. What I have noticed upon reflection is that my foolish acts and foolish beliefs have often been the product of my committing to an irrational trust in my own magical thinking. The more complex and convoluted the magic, the greater the fool, I am. This is how it appears to me, anyway.
Living in my head, as I do, creates a greater risk of being vulnerable to believing thoughts left unscrutinized by the reality police. Without vigilant self-discipline that demands ,rigorous inspection of our thought process,I have sometimes been persuaded to believe the nonsense that gets generated during the overall course of thinking about a particular thing: a person, an event, an idea. Typically, I will be thinking about something that resides in a certain neighborhood of my head that is not really that safe to walk around. Having claims to it is the Committee.This Committee in my head is perpetually in session, with something to say about everything. Which means they never stop talking. It is this incessant chatter I am escaping when I take a flight into fantasy and adopt the beliefs & customs navigating the streets of fantasy land requires.
One way this manifests itself is through idealism. I am an idealist. I generate an abundance of passion when idealistic thinking is involved. This has its benefits and its pitfalls. One pitfall being the potential realization that what was idealized has no parallel existence in the real world. When this happens, the realization comes too late to prevent what necessarily would have been foolish in every manner of thought, action and representation of belief. This is the kind of magical thinking most human beings grow out of by the time they reach adolescence. Having make believe friends and super powers is healthy for a 9 year old. Not so much for an average 45 year old.adult.
When not for some vital cause or line-drawn-in-the-sand principle, my terrible decisions can often be traced to wishful thinking. Despite my knowing better, I behave as if my wishing something were enough to make that thing true. For instance, I might wish that this person I've lived with as my significant other for a few years is an unmined gem of potential-a real diamond lost in a mound of refuse when all indicators point only to the presence of a growing mound of garbage. Still, I hold fast. In fact, any argument that this wishful thinking on my part is preventing me from recognizing the true hopelessness of my S.O.'s character may invoke the idealist in me to make ready for battle to defend the principle of protecting the ennobled underdog. If this occurs, it will take much more time and extoll a much greater price before I escape my own idiocy.
You would think I would of noticed something like this before now. Right? Well, that's the source of an entirely new topic that describes my tendency to grasp the obvious decades after a fact and regardless of the delay, my discovering what had been obvious to the rest of universe never ceases to incite my unbridled excitement and awe.
I am a fool.
A fool, noun (n.), as I understand the meaning, is someone who does not exercise the wisdom that similarly situated people are expected to have. This dearth in ability to make good judgments may be the result of naivete or imposed biological determinants limiting innate intelligence, cognitive functions or learning.
It isn't someone with a reasonable lack of wisdom or knowledge such as that we experience as ignorance and it also isn't the intentional ignorance people deliberately cultivate in order to rationalize or accept lazy or evil behaviors.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe my basic abilities and measures of intelligence or logical thinking are the source of my own foolishness. What I have noticed upon reflection is that my foolish acts and foolish beliefs have often been the product of my committing to an irrational trust in my own magical thinking. The more complex and convoluted the magic, the greater the fool, I am. This is how it appears to me, anyway.
Living in my head, as I do, creates a greater risk of being vulnerable to believing thoughts left unscrutinized by the reality police. Without vigilant self-discipline that demands ,rigorous inspection of our thought process,I have sometimes been persuaded to believe the nonsense that gets generated during the overall course of thinking about a particular thing: a person, an event, an idea. Typically, I will be thinking about something that resides in a certain neighborhood of my head that is not really that safe to walk around. Having claims to it is the Committee.This Committee in my head is perpetually in session, with something to say about everything. Which means they never stop talking. It is this incessant chatter I am escaping when I take a flight into fantasy and adopt the beliefs & customs navigating the streets of fantasy land requires.
One way this manifests itself is through idealism. I am an idealist. I generate an abundance of passion when idealistic thinking is involved. This has its benefits and its pitfalls. One pitfall being the potential realization that what was idealized has no parallel existence in the real world. When this happens, the realization comes too late to prevent what necessarily would have been foolish in every manner of thought, action and representation of belief. This is the kind of magical thinking most human beings grow out of by the time they reach adolescence. Having make believe friends and super powers is healthy for a 9 year old. Not so much for an average 45 year old.adult.
When not for some vital cause or line-drawn-in-the-sand principle, my terrible decisions can often be traced to wishful thinking. Despite my knowing better, I behave as if my wishing something were enough to make that thing true. For instance, I might wish that this person I've lived with as my significant other for a few years is an unmined gem of potential-a real diamond lost in a mound of refuse when all indicators point only to the presence of a growing mound of garbage. Still, I hold fast. In fact, any argument that this wishful thinking on my part is preventing me from recognizing the true hopelessness of my S.O.'s character may invoke the idealist in me to make ready for battle to defend the principle of protecting the ennobled underdog. If this occurs, it will take much more time and extoll a much greater price before I escape my own idiocy.
You would think I would of noticed something like this before now. Right? Well, that's the source of an entirely new topic that describes my tendency to grasp the obvious decades after a fact and regardless of the delay, my discovering what had been obvious to the rest of universe never ceases to incite my unbridled excitement and awe.
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