How’s your self-discipline?

Curious notion, no? Superior and subordinate, master and servant, but who is who and which which?

Both concepts in this complicated compound are uniquely human. Dog Henry has no self-discipline because he doesn’t need any. He’s like Annie Oakley’s kith in Irving Berlin’s toe-tapping rendition:

Disciples, or learners, are trying to make of themselves something unlike themselves, unnatural, preferable (presumably) to the original. Whoever mischievously suggested to our “self” we weren’t OK as is? Why be other than I am?

My self-discipline stinks. I’m either (depending on your point of view) a lousy learner or reprehensible reprobate, forever hectoring myself to be someone different. Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni is my prototype, seduced by the insatiable Don: Vorrei e non vorrei, she whimpers pertly; “I want to and I don’t.”

What I should be doing, I tell myself, is buckling down, focusing, attaching myself like a train to its track and chugging toward my depot. Piece of cake, everybody does it, so why not I? Because, as I explain in this interminable internal colloquy, that depot is a delusion, bullshit really, an abhorrent inheritance of group-think, and I mean to be my own man, think my own thoughts, chart my own course, go my own way, as my nature dictates, and if that means goofing off, slamming my study door, or going to live alone for two years in a tiny hut by a pond, well, so be it, that’s my nature, so beat it, can’t you, with your obedience nonsense. I prod myself to write – then mock myself for preening. Who cares what you write, you ninny, we’re all dust in waiting, “why seems it so particular with you?” (Both sides in this debate quote Hamlet.) I tell myself to make money, promote my “platform,” schmooze with neighbors, lose weight, learn a language, shelve stacked books, schedule a colonoscopy, and how do I respond? With a raised middle finger, Bronx cheer, and crude epithet. What a child am I! Meanwhile Henry lolls luxuriantly in his preferred chair, not a care in the world, bemused by my continual crisis. “Getta life, man,” he mutters – sympathetically, yet dismissively – in Dog.

I do not believe in self-discipline, that’s the nub of it. I wish God, like a loving parent, would instruct me what to do, no ifs or buts, so I’d know no need to decide, simply obey. And He does sometimes, tells me, for example, to oppose the calamitous corrosion of human morals I discern in society, to bawl like Ezekiel with all I’ve got. And I obey, poor you. But more often His guidance, while potent and persuasive, helps hardly at all. “Be the best you can be,” he murmurs in the dark, “live the life you were born for, follow your star.” But which you, life, star is He referring to? How am I to know!

My circumstance, albeit ludicrous, is not, I’m betting, unique. We all struggle at least a little to conform to some rulebook we didn’t write and don’t really believe in. Why should we “win one for the Gipper” or genuflect another’s altar or salute some flag? Aren’t such symbols frauds, as Freud decreed God?

In my latter years I’ve settled on Love as my default navigator. (Love, God, Beauty, Grace, Truth, Justice, Kindness, Mercy, Generosity, are all aliases for the same imperative.) I love you and love what I’m doing – so here we are.