Constructive Living, Session 3: Without Responsibility, We Will Never Sort it Out
“The more we allow feelings to govern our lives, the more they spread to govern even larger areas of life.”
During restless nights, you might find your mind very busy. Getting up to go to the bathroom jolts you awake from a series of nonsensical, disconnected thoughts. You might be replaying a random line from the TV show you watched before bed. Perhaps you're in a mental tussle with yourself or another person. You may notice your mind is overloaded with pointless thoughts, consuming your mental capacity in both your waking and sleeping hours.
In her book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher cites research showing that when we sleep, most of our “dreams are the bad kind.”
Our waking life is not much better. Gallagher writes, “According to psychology’s ‘negativity bias theory,’ we pay more attention to unpleasant feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness because they’re simply more powerful than the agreeable sort.”
In short, we “spend a lot of time feeling crummy even if [our] life is pretty good.”
C. S. Lewis's last novel, Till We Have Faces, retells the Cupid and Psyche myth. Queen Orual's memoirs chronicle her life, from childhood to her emotionally tormented elder years. Her memoirs are purposeful. She feels the gods have dealt her a raw deal and wants to make the case that she has led a virtuous life, particularly in her treatment of her younger sister, Psyche.
In truth, Orual shattered Psyche’s idyllic life. And now, in her old age, Orual continues to justify her actions. Orual’s mental churning was “sifting and sorting, separating motive from motive and both from pretext.”
Orual’s “continual labour” of justification overflows into her sleep: “And the same sorting went on every night in my dreams, but in a changed fashion I thought I had before me a huge hopeless pile of seeds, wheat, barley, poppy, rye, Millet, whatnot? and I must sort them out and make separate piles, each all of one kind.”
The Queen laments, “Why I must do that, I did not know; But infinite punishment would fall upon me if I rested a moment from my labour or if, when all was done a single seed were in the wrong pile.”
Of course, the infinite punishment Orual fears is a projection. Once Orual went down the path of justifying her innocence, she had to establish who the guilty party was so that the gods would not punish her for her sins. Personal responsibility was the last thing on her mind.
Perhaps Lewis is optimistic when he writes, “In waking life a man would know the task impossible. The torment of the dream was that, there, it could conceivably be done.” Like Orual, don’t we sometimes labor to make another guilty as our emotional sorting goes full steam ahead?