Inner Sanctum

I can’t speak for anyone else when writing this particular article, for when it all comes down to it, I have to pass through my own life from the subjective viewpoint of an individual. One of the ideas that I believe in is that, arguments about the ultimate nature of free will aside, I control my mind. Which may sound a little circular if you were to start out with the assumption that it is my mind that is doing the controlling!

But it’s true that I believe this, as silly as this may or may not seem. Furthermore, there is something on the order of a “virtual” place within my mind where I dwell and work on “redesigning” my thoughts and goals. I call this my “inner sanctum”, for obvious reasons.

It’s important to have some kind of battle plan when starting out on my day. Otherwise, I would be bouncing around from one externally-imposed obligation to another, sliding into lethargy and complete self-indulgence between “duty moments”. No, I must design my patterns of thinking and resultant behavior according to a paradigm that includes devotion to responsibilities (with boundaries) but which transcends those obligations, being directed to my own personal aims. With me freely posing difficult questions to myself and mulling over them, testing, and refining my answers according to my developing web of experiences. And to help accomplish this, I stole a page from Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

One of Covey’s habits is “Begin with the end in mind”. The way I interpret this is that I should imagine myself being very old, possibly in my nineties and looking back on how I spent my life for the past forty years. From this day (in September 2008) onward, not going back to my earlier life. And evaluating how wisely I spent my time. To accomplish this, I need to ascertain which values I hold the most strongly and base my imagined “backward” reflections on these values as a yardstick for judgment. And I’m not sure that some of these values would be of the sort that a beauty contest finalist would use to answer the final “big question”!

Do you have a blackboard to write your thoughts on and then erase when they don’t “fit together” right? I do, but it’s back hidden in my garage somewhere. But it seems like it might be a useful tool for my values clarification and goal-definitions. It reminds me of one episode in The Prisoner television series titled Free For All, where the Prisoner is shown by his captor a hidden laboratory that a fellow prisoner, a scientist, is allowed to freely continue his scientific research in without interference. There was a big blackboard in the lab that the scientist would fill with his thoughts and observations. The “authorities” would simply photograph it from time to time to gain the information they wanted. With me, it’s something like that, except that it is I who am holding my own thoughts captive. Maybe I’ll just take digital photos of my own blackboard from time to time!