THAT'S MEN:A constant battle against maintaining morals
I HAPPENED to be in a place the other day where I observed a woman giving out to a man. She was pointing out to him that with his drinking, smoking, fondness of fries and so on and so forth he was on the road to an early grave.
The man sheepishly agreed but you could tell he hadn’t the remotest intention of changing his ways.
The woman knew this too and demanded why he was not willing to act in his own best interests? He gave her the standard reply in these situations: “Ah sure. You know yourself.”
She declared for the umpteenth time that she was giving up on him. He relaxed. Equilibrium had been restored.
This man is more honest than most of us, men or women. He knows he will go on indulging his demons and he does not pretend otherwise.
The rest of us, I would contend, engage in a grand deception of ourselves and the world. We tell ourselves that we are healthy, sober, fit-as-a-fiddle citizens. It is the imposters who drink too much, eat the wrong food and stay in bed when they could be out for an early morning run. These imposters have nothing to do with us.
What is going on? Why don’t we act in our own interests?
After all, we live in an era in which information about health and wellbeing was never more plentiful.
Sigmund Freud might have the answer. According to Freud, we are born with an instinctive drive for pleasure and aggression and to hell with everything else.
Needless to say, this won’t do and so we are provided with a set of moral rules, mainly through our parents, to oblige us to restrain ourselves.
When we do the right thing – have that muesli for breakfast, cut out the large glass of wine when you’re making the dinner, pound the pavements in the rain – the moralist in you purrs and strokes you and you feel good.
Ah but – along comes the desire for whatever your personal poison is and before you know it there you are, hungover, bloated, creaking at the joints. Your moralist does not approve and so you now condemn yourself and promise to do better in the future.
So that’s the battle that goes on and the bad news is that it’s never going to end: it’s a war of attrition which, as I understand it, is a war that neither side can win.
You can sprinkle yourself with holy water, you can put on the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk, you can adopt as righteous a demeanour as you like, but the war will never be over.
Add to all this the idea that you are made up of more than one self. There is the self who wants to do the “right” thing. Then there is the self who wants to do what it wants to do.
And where are you in all of this? You are the conductor of the orchestra. The problem is, it’s impossible to know, from day to day, which orchestra you are conducting.
One day you are up there on your stand, waving your baton, and everything works perfectly. Your players have put in their work and they can play the most difficult of pieces with perfection.
Next day, as soon as you pick up the baton, you realise that the players of the previous day have been mysteriously replaced by a crowd of chancers, corner boys and ne’er do wells.
This lot play whatever tune they feel like playing and when they are “in the moment”, so to speak, they couldn’t care less about right or wrong.
Do you see how little chance you have of doing the right thing all the time?
And do you appreciate the wisdom of that man who, knowing the score, summed up life’s dilemma with the words, “Ah sure. You know yourself”?
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is accredited as a counsellor by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
His book, Light Mind - mindfulness for daily living, is published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email