Will Hicock Low:
He Met Within the Murmurous Vestibule,
His Young Disciple (1885)

"Almost nothing demands more Discipline than this!"

I was up at 2 AM yesterday, wondering if I still possessed the Discipline to continue writing or if I ever truly possessed it. Discipline was never one of the more tangible possessions. It does not hang near any surface but remains hidden within time. It only ever appears over some longer duration than any instant. I've been meditating twice daily since the Spring of 1974, over fifty years. I've missed a handful of sessions over that period, but no more than the sparest handful, so it might seem beyond question that I possess Discipline, yet I still question myself. Discipline dispensed in twenty-minute increments might be insignificant and hardly seem to make any difference. I cannot assess the difference fifty years of meditating made because I neglected to include a control in the experiment. I would have needed a clone to not meditate over the same period to determine if the Discipline has made any difference.

I can say that I can sit still for any odd half hour. I do not tend to fidget much. Is this ability evidence of Discipline or merely accustomed habit? I don't need constant entertainment or reassurance, either. I can work without listening to music or some podcast, and I often prefer to listen to whatever is echoing in my head unassisted by external inputs. That said, some mornings I faunch when putting on the old harness. I do not always feel like writing when I get up in the morning, and I exhibit perhaps my greatest skill on those mornings: procrastination. I'm no amateur in that Discipline, but a professional crastinator. I can fritter away time like nobody's business, but even then, I almost always succeed in publishing something by nine at the latest. I might have been up since two, but I successfully distracted myself for five or six hours before finally setting this old nose to the grindstone. Was that Discipline or its shadow?

The sin of being needier than my project stands among the greatest sins on which I can call myself. It's evidence of an internal vacuousness so great that it inhibits performance. It sucks. Those who cannot bear to be in a room where the television isn't turned on or in a car without the radio blaring, these people scare me. The most sublime gift is the ability to contribute my greatest treasure, my time, to anything. My capacity seems far from infinite, and I remain fully capable of reneging on my commitments. I have my limits. The Muse insists that my birth family must have had some strict rules about self-discipline since I can be fairly obsessive about not taking vacations. I've never once felt as if I've earned time off. I look for my rewards in the effort itself rather than in its absence. Is that Discipline?

Discipline seems indistinguishable from any of several neuroses out there. Are the obsessive-compulsive naturally more Disciplined than others? Are the Attention Deficit Disordered any less Disciplined? A compulsion toward self-sacrificial behaviors might look like Discipline, but it might be evidence of an overwhelming internal emptiness. Is guilt-driven behavior Discipline or pathology? Who's to say? Today, I cannot determine if I possess an odd ounce of Discipline. I have no suggestions for how anyone might come to possess Discipline, either, other than to suggest that it might make sense to attempt to accumulate it in tiny, regular increments—practice for minutes rather than hours or if you must, hours rather than days. If they ever did, nobody except the Dali Lama needs to become the Dali Lama to succeed. No matter how much gumption or practice, nobody's ever managed to hold their breath for longer than perhaps five minutes. Almost nothing demands more Discipline than this!

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz