They come to you effortlessly as you gaze at nothing in particular, forgetting to blink or breathe. Your mind is like a wildfire, blazing across the landscape of ideas with a joyous sense of freedom. The many directions you travel reward you with insights, wisdom you think to record as a means of sharing it with others. But perhaps more important, you wish to record these thoughts for yourself in the future because it is you, after all, who explores these expanses with such joy. And so you try.
You search your room for a pen and paper to write upon. You settle for a pencil and the measly white space on a glossy magazine you've never read before. You write quickly, knowing that time is of the essence, that your thoughts may soon escape you. Your focus is intense. And soon you are finished outlining one particular train of thought - on motivation - and you turn around on that great landscape to record others. But alas! You have scorched your path backwards in your fervor.
And so you are left at a loss, your mind focused on nothing in particular (having finished the outline), as you quietly resume your chores.
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I once overheard a conversation about motivation. As a person seeking change, one speaker proclaimed, you may have two different kinds of reasons. You either desire some improved state of affairs or you seek to escape a current source of misery. The latter of the two he called desperation. The former, I suppose, is hope. This classification cleaved the world neatly in a way that seemed perfectly natural to me at the time.
It seems intuitive that hope is preferable over desperation as a source of action. It's not, however, because desperation implies misery and hope doesn't. Hope is most salient when things are at their worst. Its existence is a bastion of strength and a moving message. Desperation in times of misery is understandable. It's tempting to say desperation is self-defeating as well, but desperation is not the same as the various reactions we have to desperation such as escapism, denial, and recklessness.
Not mentioned by the speaker is a third option for the person seeking change: he can distance himself from his desires and accept his current situation. If desperation seemed intuitively something to be avoided, it is important to consider that hope, containing within it desire and vulnerability, is also something which people sometimes avoid.
One might be tempted to understand distancing oneself from desire as an ideal - Buddhism comes to mind for me - but there are certainly improper ways to implement this ideal also. What happens if you distance yourself from desire by denying these aspects of yourself? If the existence of selfish feeling becomes a source of shame? Then there comes into existence an inescapable contradiction. You desire to do good, to be compassionate for example, for others but you realize that this is largely acting in the interests of others. Interests, never mind what they are, which you denied yourself as shameful because of your ideal. You lose authority over yourself as you are unwilling to use the most basic justification, or perhaps you blind yourself to the fact that it even counts as a justification, for your actions: you want something.
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If you imagine human knowledge as a circle, what does an individual's knowledge amount to within that circle? I imagined something like an amoeba. The amoeba grows as it consumes "experiences" as food. It comes to recognize particular experiences as desirable and others as undesirable. It displays curiosity by seeking out novel experiences, some of which cause it to grow rapidly and others which contribute little or even cause harm. The amoeba can only grow so large, however. It will always be dwarfed by the landscape in which it finds itself. I bet amoebas get lost sometimes too.
