December 23
Only the wise man is free. For freedom is not doing what one wants, but being master of one's own wanting. Whoever serves his desires is a slave, even if he wears no chain.
Paradoxa Stoicorum (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Only the wise man is free. For freedom is not doing what one wants, but being master of one's own wanting. Whoever serves his desires is a slave, even if he wears no chain.
Sometimes you wish you wanted a little less. You notice how often, in the evening, you start another episode even though you've long been tired, and you resolve to stop. In that moment there are two wishes, and you take the side of one of them.
After a few weeks it works. You count the evenings on which you held firm, and one you botch annoys you more than the episode itself would ever have been worth. The resolution, too, has begun to demand something of you. It is just more respectable than what it pushed aside.
Therein lies a difficulty: you always decide about your wanting with another wanting. There is no place outside it from which you could govern, uninvolved. The difference perhaps lies less in which wish prevails than in whether you can still ask it what it is actually there for.
One evening you watch the episode again, because it's good, and you know fairly precisely why. The next, you read. Only later do you notice that you weren't keeping count.
