The Yodic Ultimatum

"Do...or do not. There is no Try..."

Anyone?

I'm now of course picturing the handful of geeks I know who read this blog acting like Hermione Granger in a classroom, but I'm going to swiftly and continually ignore the lot of you and act like no-one knows, so I can have the pleasure of telling you.

This, of course, is Yoda, the small green wisdom-cactus of the Star Wars movies, with an eight-word contribution to the world of philosophy that will, the way society is going, one day out-rank practically everything Aristotle ever wrote.

Of course, linguists and logicians have been bursting to bitch-slap the smug little puppet-bitch for decades, because of course there is such a thing as trying. You can try and succeed, or you can try and fail, just as you can not-try and succeed, or not-try and fail. It makes more intrinsic sense when you try and succeed, and it makes as much sense when you don't try and fail - that's the point of training, after all, to establish neural networks and muscle-memory to increase the statistical likelihood that you'll succeed.


Ahhhhhhhh....
I know you don't care, but I feel so much better having got that off my increasingly impressive chest.

The thing is, this Yodic Ultimatum has been on my mind lately. While out walking with Ma, I told her about how the middle way, the idea of Aristotelian restraint, had spectacularly failed for me, because there's something hardwired in my brain that actually gets more depressed at just having "a little of what you fancy" than it does in either the state of gorging or the state of complete impulse-control and self-denial.

The middle way, I said, seemed pointless to something deep in my psyche. Pointless, and what's more, untenable.
"...which in itself if a bit depressing, because it means I'm going to spend the rest of my life either Disappearing or Reappearing, rather than just Being..." I said. Ma had been sympathetic so far - she herself has always hated shades of grey (the condition, not the books. I really haven't asked her what she thinks of the books. All in all, it hasn't been the year for it). She's always said that she can live with black and white, but that grey - the middle - drives her absolutely up the wall. At this bit of self-pity though, she took issue.

"Yes, but it's your brain, isn't it? You rule it, it doesn't rule you..."
I told her the jury was probably still out on that.
"...cos you're a stubborn little bugger when you try," she added.

And there's the rub. I'm not a stubborn bastard when I try. I'm a stubborn bastard when I do. When I can switch my brain into "this is what is happening now" mode...then this - not not-this, not nearly-this, not close-to-this-but-no-cigar, but this, the whole this and nothing but the this - is what will happen. Trying to do this, wanting to do this, finding ways to explain why I'm not doing this, setting deadlines and goals and strategies for this-achievement are all, to me, entirely meaningless. I either do this, or I do not. Trying exists in the middle, the soggy zone of ordinary human temptation, emotion, and swamp-like blurred focus. Plenty of people try, and succeed. But for me, there really is no practical purpose to trying. I either have to do, or not do.

Can't tell you how much it irritates me that the hairy-eared green homonculus happens to be right about that. but he is.

So what does that mean, exactly? Where do I go from this not-exactly-revelation? I have no freaking idea. I feel Disappearingly rudderless, able only, through trying, to hold back the worst of possibilities. And it occurs to me, in moments when I want to give myself a break, that in 12 months of Doing, I lost five stone, and in seven months of merely trying, I've only put back on two of them, so there IS a quantitative value to trying.

It's just not as much good as Doing, that's all...