from Sara...

AUGUST 20, 2009 8:25 PM
----My relationship with sloth is oblique: I am tortured by saying I will do something and then not, usually because I get so oh busy doing something else. The consequence is feeling that I can't trust myself, a lack of integrity. Faithfulness feels like a way out, though it seems abstract at the moment.----

Sara, that's exactly my relationship with sloth too. But not from being busy with something else. Just from not feeling like it or wanting to. But it's the same consequence you say, feeling that I can't trust myself, that I or others can't count on me.

I am one big question mark as to how faithfulness could be a way out of that, but I too have an intuition that it may be. And I am interested in pursuing the question.

Here are three things I have a strong desire to do and have been unsuccessful with for the last three years or longer. That's a long time. The inability to move these three boulders keeps me in a relationship of weakness, failure and disappointment with myself.

Lose twenty pounds--less food/wine, some exercise
Embark on, pursue, and complete a new writing project.
Rejuvenate a regular morning meditation practice.

One thing I know doesn't work is making commitments. I make them to break them. I can't really see how faithfulness applies here, or could be a way out. This is not a case of "not knowing the good, but being steadfast in its pursuit," is it? So maybe I'm wrong about that. That would leave me still staring at these three desire/obstacles. Right back in our original discussion of "Sloth or Acedia.....to know the good and be lax in its pursuit. Could we seriously attempt to deconstruct this in a way that would make a difference?

Charles says I take myself out of the game right away and make an enemy of the thing I wanted.

The username for this blog is my e-mail, and the password is sherwood. Sara and anyone else reading here, see if that will allow you to post directly onto the blog instead of as a comment. If it works, please put your name in the title as I did Sara's here.