strike one

2005-03-27 00:24:18 -0800

I don't know whether the greatest factor fundamentally is complacency, laziness, indifference, or absent-mindedness, but I've managed to miss a day already. I suppose I had to have acknowledged the possibility of failure considering that I had only committed to seven days, and yet still did not have complete confidence that I would succeed. I guess it's the manner in which I failed that is most troublesome. I had imagined a scenario along the lines of having a long, hectic day full of distractions that triggered my increasingly powerful tendency to take the path of least resistance. Instead, I simply forgot; I forgot that I had made a commitment. It didn't occur to me all day that I was not doing something I had chosen to do.

I feel like I was significantly more responsible and disciplined when I was younger. Of course, I did have motivations then that are entirely absent now, and a sort of self-involved idealism that allowed me to dismiss (or reinterpret) whatever aspects of the greater world that were incompatible with my elaborate conceptual fictions. Now I seem to take for granted that no choice I make or action I take can be meaningful outside of the myopic tableau of my personal perception (which I tend to hold quite low in esteem—if I can even be bothered to consider it). I suppose this itself may be a new manifestation of self-involved idealism. Though clearly this sort of cynical fatalism is not idealism, but rather something closer to base-ism.