September 15
Necessity is an evil — but there is no necessity to live in it. The ways out into the open lie open everywhere.
Principal Doctrines (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Necessity is an evil — but there is no necessity to live in it. The ways out into the open lie open everywhere.
“I still have to” is a convenient phrase. With it you can end a conversation without offending anyone, and you don’t have to ask yourself whether you actually want to. Some of it is true, of course: the rent comes due, someone is waiting for you, a deadline is running out.
But that “have to” likes to spread. It settles over things that are mere habit, over invitations you never seriously considered, over a tone you picked up at some point. Over time your whole day sounds like a list of other people’s demands, although you wrote some of its lines yourself.
It becomes uncomfortable as soon as you keep the two apart. What really has to be stays hard. Everything else suddenly falls to you, including what you go on doing although you could leave it. A way out is not only a relief. It also takes away an excuse.
Perhaps you stay with much of it anyway. The next morning your day looks hardly any different from yesterday. Only now it belongs to you a little more, even where you don’t like it.
