26: Weak Discipline

26 

WEAK DISCIPLINE 

          I hate being scolded by life. I know what I’m supposed to do, but I don’t; and then life comes along and scolds me, and I just hate it. But it’s not life that I hate, really; it’s my lack of self-discipline. And this is the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

“Would you like to go out for breakfast?” I asked Penny Lynn Sunday morning, seeing that it was a beautiful spring morning and it would be a refreshing little outing.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, smiling.

“How about The Blue Sky in Penetang,” I replied; and although the café looked full when I parked the car on the street just down from the Blue Sky, we were given a table for two in the window alcove, which was nice and intimate and visually spacious.

Penny had a feta cheese omelet and I had their peameal ham and egg special, but as we enjoyed our breakfast I saw a man back his van into the driveway next door and watched him get out and unlock the door to his house. He was a big man, under sixty, but overweight and slovenly gone to seed, and suddenly there flashed across my mind a newspaper headline that I had made a note of because it was my inspiration for a spiritual musing.

The headline in the Financial Post section of the newspaper (I never read the financial section, nor the sports section for that matter) read: WEAK DISCIPLINE, and I kept the paper on that page on the table beside my recliner in our sun room because I wanted to be reminded to write a spiritual musing that that headline had inspired; but over the next week or so I got so tired of seeing the bold letters of WEAK DISCIPLINE staring up at me every time I sat in my recliner to read or watch TV that I threw the paper into the Blue Box for recycling. And Sunday when Penny and I were having breakfast at the Blue Sky and I saw that big man who had gone to seed, WEAK DISCIPLINE flashed across my mind in flashing neon colours; and I knew I had just been called again to write my spiritual musing on self-discipline.

And, as the merciful (sometimes merciless, depending upon one’s frame of mind) law of divine synchronicity would have it, when we got home after breakfast and enjoyable country drive I read the book section of my Saturday’s Globe and Mail and the headline A NEW YOU shouted out at me like a barker at the old carny—a review of Gretchin Rubin’s new book Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Every Day Lives, which confirmed the imperative from my unconscious to write my spiritual musing on self-discipline.

I knew the Gretchin Rubin story, which had launched her literary career and made her a go-to person with her 2009 self-help bible The Happiness Project that spent 107 weeks on the New York Times best seller list and sold 1.5 million copies; and now she was back with a follow-up book to re-enforce the happiness-making discipline of The Happiness Project, and, perhaps, placate her and her reader’s conscience for lapsing in the healthy habits that brought happiness into one’s life; so I read Courtney Shea’s carefully guardedly sarcastic review of Rubin’s Better than Before, because I had been summoned to read it by the terrifying image of that slovenly overweight man in Penetang who had gone to seed… 

If I may, let me say that I honestly appreciate the guidance that we get from the omniscient guiding force of life; because, as I have happily come to see, the more we pay attention to the little signs, coincidences, and synchronicities that come our way the more we align our life with our destined purpose; so as much as I hated being scolded by life with the disturbing image of the man that had gone to seed, I was thankful for being reminded of what I could become in a few years if I don’t start mastering new habits for self-discipline.

The first habit that I want to master is reading poetry again every morning to start my day, beginning with Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” because this poem always lifts my spirits and inspires me to take a positive view on life. And I’ve already committed the last two lines to memory, because they are so uplifting: “God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure; /I’ll think of the Leech Gatherer on the lonely moor!”

Wordsworth met the Leech Gatherer on the lonely moor one morning when the spirit of gloom and doom (his shadow) possessed him. “We poets in our youth begin in gladness, /But thereof come in the end despondency and madness,” wrote the lonely poet; and then, as providence would have it, he met an old Leech Gatherer whose indomitable spirit and choice words “with something of a lofty utterance dressed” lifted the dejected poet out of his despair and melancholy. So “Resolution and Independence” will be my salvific way to begin my day, a pre-emptive measure to keep the spirit of gloom and doom away.

And I have to read my morning poetry out loud, because something magical happens when the soul of the poet’s wisdom is released into the air with the sound of one’s voice; the vibrations of the poet’s words entrain the vibrations of one’s soul, and the poet’s wisdom becomes one’s own like the entrainment of the independent rhythm of two grandfather clock pendulums swinging in harmonious unison—an inexplicable, but efficient way to nourish one’s hungry soul. And speaking of hunger, how wise it would be to curb my appetite!

And I have to start walking more, and further. Ever since I had open heart surgery I’ve made excuses for my damaged heart to not be too physical; but I can stop rationalizing now and get on with my new coincidence-inspired program if I don’t want to go to seed.

As St. Padre Pio told me in my new book on “active imagination” (Carl Jung called his “confrontation with the unconscious” an exercise in “active imagination”, and which he bequeathed to the world in his iconic Red Book), I have to start my new program slowly; but I have to start doing it. Here’s what my creative unconscious (or was it the Good Saint; I can’t be sure any more than Neale Donald Wash was sure that God spoke to him in his many Conversations with God books) said to me: 

“The DOING is what counts. In the DOING comes the reality. Just write STRONG DISCIPLINE into your script and start the process, inch by inch and not mile by mile. To run the mile you have to run the inch first. That’s your starting point. Inch by inch.” 

As my mother used to say: “Chi van piano va sano va lontagno.” And the literal translation, which I’m going to take to heart in my new program, simply means that if I go slowly I will go a long way in good health; and maybe, just maybe, I won’t go to seed.

 

───