Often I wake to me whining. Why? Why me? Why now? The unfairness of it all! Gloom and doom.

I must wash my mind as I must my body to make it presentable. That I know the replies to my laments does not prevent them. I must groan, it seems, as I must yawn, before getting on with my day.

This contest between selves interests me, an unwelcome tug of war, but inevitable apparently. Dog-pal Henry, waking, may be sleepy, may yawn (disclosing his adorable pink tongue), but he does not resist or resent. No alternative reality tempts or taunts. Time to go out? OK, let’s go. The weather’s not to his liking? Well, what can you do.

I counsel myself to accept my conditions without complaint, Henry-style. You are where you are, Carll, deal with it, get cracking. I accept the soundness of my advice, I need no convincing, yet I don’t seem convinced.

Many-mindedness is the human peculiarity. No one of us is one. How many we are is a matter of speculation. Freud saw us as three – id, ego, superego – but this is a word-game, no demonstrable actuality. I detect in myself a discordant congress of selves, hollering objections, demanding acknowledgement from the Chair (who’s only Chair pro tem).

Why this inconvenient proliferation of voices, this wrangle to – as the phrase goes – “make up my mind”?

Evolution is never inadvertent. That was Darwin’s discovery. If we’ve developed in a direction, there’s a reason for it, which may not be easy to discern. “Nothing,” as Lear growls, “comes from nothing.”

Henry’s equanimity works for him. Domesticated from wolves, dogs figured out it paid to be pleasant. Their masters liked them better if they acquiesced; they got fed and petted. So go with the flow. Three hundred and fifty thousand years of trial and error have made Henry amazingly nice. He only resists our commands playfully or when he’s feeling punk.

Easy acquiescence works less well for humans, who prey on one another. Turn the other cheek and soon you’ll have no cheek left. We kill, cheat, deceive, threaten for our advantage. We might not get fed if we don’t feed ourselves.

This incessant jeopardy makes us wily, clever, cruel. Our thinking powers developed with use. If either A or B could be true, it behooved us to sort out the difference to stay alive. Eat or be eaten.

Thinking, like any other skill, strengthens with practice. Having started thinking we couldn’t stop. What if, we asked, and why, and how. Soon enough we were thinking ourselves into knots (with a k). A, B, and a whole alphabet of possibilities had to be sorted. We invented religion, art, government, money, weapons, smartphones in self-defense.

Consciousness separated into contending interests, not readily reconciled. Stomachs sought food, limbs to loll, injured pride hankered for revenge, unruly male members rioted, and so forth. Who or what could quell this cacophony! We thought ourselves into bewilderment, exhaustion. After a while, being smart stupefied.

Each of us copes with our querulity in our own way. Some jog. Some scourge themselves. Some pray. Some play Wordle. I write. By whatever means, we must herd our kennel of contentious selves into a single direction, lest we be pounced upon while paralyzed. This shepherding takes doing: force, persuasion, tact. I cannot simply command my whining selves to pipe down, without inviting future demonstrations.

It’s hard being human if you take the job seriously. Tolstoy would have preferred to be a tree, I Henry at his ease, but no one asked.