"The depths of the Queen's sorrow remain impenetrable. She has now restricted herself to a regime of such ferocious introspection that we are all at our wits' end."
- Mrs. Brown
"Regime"... "ferocious introspection"... Now that's funny. As if sorrow and introspection is something you impose on yourself with vigor, like excercise.
And perhaps it is.
5 comments:
I can totally relate to that--ferocious introspection. At a time in my life when everything came crashing down upon me, and I realized that this was the second time this particular lesson had come around for me, I subjected myself to just such a regime with great ferocity, and equally beneficial outcome.
"I can totally relate to that--ferocious introspection."
Haha, me too.
Recently somebody told me that she did not want a particular subject to make me overly introverted. I told her that nothing could make me more introspective than I'd been all my life, and it hadn't done me in yet. :)
I can hardly understand not being introspective. A solid understanding of your own inner workings is necessary to make the most of your capabilities. It improves the quality of your life and heightens your problem solving abilities... Sure, it can go sour, but so can ignorance. I think the cost of ignorance outweighs its benefits most of the time. It's like standing out in the middle of the street while a ferocious hurricane rains tree branches and shrapnel upon your spongy flesh. You can pretend there's no hurricane, or that you don't know the injuries you're suffering are fatal, but at the end of the day you suffer the consequences even if you really didn't understand what was going on.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
In the US, extroversion is considered the ideal. And it will be so as long as you think the world is real and making changes in is important.
I think you'd agree that whether the world is real or not, there's little to be gained in letting the whole thing go to hell. We've still got to fill our guts, mow the lawn and keep a roof over our heads while we're here, no? Oh, and it helps if we can convince each other not to blow ourselves up. If it happens it happens, but it would be an awfully big inconvenience.
Extroversion is a problem when it either isn't natural (someone is just acting extroverted to fit in) or it's a means of distraction, like alcohol or drugs. You don't have to be introverted to be introspective. If nothing else, careful observation of the people you interact with tells you a lot about who you are.
I certainly agree that it's pointless to change the world when you've not even charted the deepest regions of your own heart. You've got no power when you're the same as you've always been but you're clamoring for change. It's like putting a fresh coat of paint on the Titanic. Any "change" that does happen then is mostly superficial.
The world we design is reflective of ourselves. Simplistic morality produces unfair laws and insane justice systems. Superficiality makes it more likely that a politician will win an election by rhetoric rather than dialogue about actual issues. A self aware person is naturally repelled by those things. Whether or not he's into world changing, that's exactly what he'll do once he's learned enough about himself. The only variable is the scale of his impact.
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