Commitments

 Post number 2 of my pledge to write a blog post every day for November. Promises are easily kept when there's a deadline for them, you can try something for a little while and get off the train, lifetime commitments are hard. Why would you ever want to do something for the rest of your life? I bet you can't think of one thing you would want for the rest of your life, or maybe you can, in any case here is a list of some stuff we already have a lifetime commitment to do every day with very sparse exceptions:

Eat food

breathe oxygen

drink liquids

sleep

use the restroom (and by this I mean shit and piss)

 think thoughts

We do this. Every day. For our entire lives. I mean, you could fast or have some sort of insomniac spell in which you don't sleep for awhile and maybe there are some days when you don't have to relieve yourself and use the restroom, maybe your constipated I don't know. You certainly can't go an entire day without breathing, and maybe your a philosophical zombie or politician (bad dum tss) in which case you don't think but you probably also have never gone a whole day without at least those two lifetime commitments. 

So there are some facets of life that never go away, your breathe and heartbeat and thoughts are with you for your entire life. We don't really sign up for these commitments, in fact with fasting we sign up to get out of them for a small amount of time. So many of my friends are getting married lately, maybe its because COVID is ending or something but honestly can you imagine being attached to someone for your entire life? In a sense having a child maybe is sort of like this too perhaps. I can't even begin to imagine being bound to someone, for every day, for my entire life.

 Relationships, when they have a deadline,  perhaps are easy to commit to when your in them. It's hard to imagine being with one person every day for my entire life, even if its healthy there most likely will be days when I  absolutely can't stand to be with someone no matter how healthy the relationship is and vice versa. Just like there are days I don't want to sleep. Just like there are days when I don't want to eat, even though I have to do these things every day.

Lifetime commitments are hard, deadline commitments are easier. Maybe there's another way to look at this when you have to do something consistently for a long period of time, and that's compartmentalizing it. By separating each chunk of time discretely, perhaps it becomes easier by thinking of only having to commit to something each year, each month, each week, each day, each hour, each second. I can't commit to breathing for the rest of my life, but I can commit to the next inhale, the next exhale, as it happens and then the next one.

Learning an entire new subject you know nothing about is maybe like this. Committing to discrete chunks, and then once those discrete chunks are complete committing to the next discrete chunks. I mean, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do you commit to learning a new subject? One fact at a time. One level of difficulty at a time. One level of competence at a time. How do you commit to a lifetime with someone? One day at a time. One month at a time. One year at a time.

Planting seeds that maybe one day grow into fruits of abundance, but they must be watered periodically, and that's where the difficulty lies. Maybe we shouldn't be looking at the fruits that we hope to blossom from our actions, but rather the actions themselves as they happen.

Or hey maybe we could all just be fuck ups. Who cares, love probably isn't real and the results of our actions have no meaning. Or maybe love is real and every one of our actions sends ripples of causality throughout the world that reverberate and resonate in ways we could never expect. I'm willing to live in this uncertainty of belief. It's terrifying and I don't recommend it, but at least I'm willing to accept either one, or maybe both, because the truth just is no matter what we believe of it.