You must not be proud, nor be given to wine Titus 1:7; 1 Timothy 3:3. Refrain from too much eating or sleeping, and from laziness Romans 12:11. Do not grumble or speak ill of others. (Rule of Saint Benedict 4. 34-40)
There are so many ways to let yourself go, in a society that is constantly egging you on to do so.
You let yourself go spiritually when you imagine yourself to be more important than other people. You let yourself go mentally when you drink till you can’t think. You let yourself go physically when you eat too much of the wrong things or not enough of the right things. Or, there’s the other kind of letting yourself go: the just not bothering to do the thing that is in fact your duty. There’s the emotional letting go of complaining. There’s the insidious social let-go of gossip.
This list of vices is certainly not exhaustive. It can serve as a point of departure. The really difficult thing, in a self-referential culture, is to grasp the paradigm: that you are responsible for holding yourself accountable to external standards in your own thoughts, words and deeds.
Why would you bother to make this effort, when you’re surrounded by people who define themselves by their imperious impulses?
The first and most glaring reason is: disgust. Merely not to resemble a long list of repellent people is powerful motivation for figuring out whatever it takes to be the opposite of what they are.
However, you need more than negative motivation to live a happy life. You need something good to aim for, something inherently worthwhile. That’s what you need, but you can’t live that sort of life unless you are that sort of person.
The first thing to do, and the secret to success in all these other areas, is to restore right worship: of God, not yourself. Do drag yourself to church on Sunday. Then rest. Taking the seventh day to rest is one of the OG Ten commandments. Yes, we are to maintain standards, but the purpose of our lives is neither productivity nor perpetual self-improvement. Your purpose is to live joyfully in harmony with your Creator, who called you into being and sustains your indestructible existence moment by moment, forever. He also gives you and everyone else freedom, for better, for worse.
When you take that seventh day to rest, you’re reinscribing yourself within a primordial order. You are also in a very real, urgent way acknowledging that all the things you want to accomplish depend on the will of God, who can take infinite action to support your endeavors if he chooses to. When you desist from work, you recognize that it’s the Holy Spirit working within you who transforms you. You are not your own creator. Neither are you the one holding the universe together. Within a society structured around antithetical premises, merely to desist from work is a genuine act of worship, and it’s not easy. This in itself will put you at odds with just about everyone, including the religious people.
Then, on Monday morning, you get up and try again. Don’t make the mistake that so many people make, of dismissing your one vice because you’re so good in other areas. Your one vice can ruin your life all by itself. Your one vice can blight the lives of everyone connected to you.
On the other hand, don’t make the opposite mistake, also desperately common, of reducing your life to one principle that you obsess about. No doubt that one principle is a good one. But a good principle applied to the exclusion of all other principles does not yield a good life.
When, on the other hand, you work intermittently but regularly on all fronts, you’ll do quite well in most areas without heroic efforts. It’s important to come to an awareness not only of your weaknesses, but of your strengths. By exercising discipline regularly–not perfectly–on all fronts, you’ll both build on your strengths and gain experience of yourself. You’ll start to realize that the impossible, overwhelming thing in your life is actually related to lots of minor things over which you can in fact gain control. In short, you will learn how to manage yourself.
Don’t try to go it alone. Find saints. Imitate people who exhibit virtues that you are trying to develop. Pray.
Immediately if you shift your thinking in this direction, your life will get more real. Suddenly every little action is like a spiritual muscle twitching. Yes, you might feel like you’re flailing for a while. But you’ll also feel like you’re really living.
