Fading Truths

There are three propositions that I know are true, but have to keep learning over and over and over again. Somebody on my interior committee must find them inconvenient, and she somehow persuades the other members to keep forgetting them. Maybe writing them down can help?

The first proposition is that the universe is perverse. This means not to count my chickens before they are hatched, because there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip. For example, if I happen to notice that a particular symptom hasn’t been bothering me lately, I can be confident that it will act up shortly. In more positive terms, to bring about a desired result I should consider acting as though it won’t happen any time soon. My mother used to light a cigarette while standing at the bus stop to make the bus come. I usually lose myself in a book.

This aversion to chicken counting may trace back to a time when school friends told me that I had achieved a much-desired honor. This turned out to be an April Fool’s trick. My heady exultation made the following disappointment twice as painful, especially when I also blamed myself for falling for the ploy. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So I adopted a protective stance towards potential good news and general pessimism.

The second proposition is that postponing a chore makes it more scary and makes my postponing it more shameful. But doing even the smallest part of the chore feels good, and can give me more impetus to tackle another piece of it. And the doing is usually much less painful than cringing beneath the pending chore’s Damoclean terror. The barrier between me and getting the chore done looks like a brick wall, but every time I dig into the chore, the wall is revealed to have been a sheet of paper. I know this, but I keep forgetting it and hunch in a corner hoping that the chore will just go away. Most chores won’t just go away, but some can be put off nearly indefinitely.

Finally, I am not the most compliant of patients, but sometimes I remember that if I do follow a doctor’s instructions long enough, they usually work. Experts in general give good advice, by definition. Whence springs my tendency to ignore advice? Pessimism, laziness, the sense that many situations will resolve themselves over time? Stubborn self-reliance? Past experiences in which following advice made things worse? I don’t know, but I have lively arguments with myself about which advice to follow, and in what way, and for how long before giving up.

So, these are the truths that I have the hardest time remembering. Ideally, I could track down the committee member who is each truth’s strongest opponent, and negotiate her into some kind of détente. But that sounds like a lot of work.