But let me digress for a moment. What it takes to become economically secure has changed considerably. It was once (often) true that we could work hard, save, invest and expect to live out our lives in a meaningful and comfortable way. But in these times, neither job nor investment is predictably secure. A bubble undermined our economic viability. The bubble burst when our too radically programmed drive to be relentlessly acquisitive was over-leveraged by imprudent credit risks, when the worth of that being sold was based on grossly inflated value, when government oversight was incompetent if not corrupt and when the behavior of some in key positions was outright criminal.

This means that wanting to accumulate greater wealth, as a hedge against the uncertainties of these times seems to me a prudent choice. Such a hedge is not the Scoreboard-driven, relentlessly acquisitive individualism that I am discussing in this post. I hope your hard work and due diligence are paying off economically.

Back now to a shift in focus. We can’t really escape the cultural impress. We’ll always have to wrestle with its contestable and contested truths and with what it says (arguably) constitutes meaning and merit. But our intelligence and education make it possible for us to hold opposing meaning and value. We need not be limited to the cultural imprint. We can create a life of our own design and bring into existence a new substantive dimension of resource—of mind, will and identity that is no longer at the mercy of Scoreboard.

But it is also true that we must discover, invent and hold this possibility, not only in its design stage, but forever. This is because timeliness is critical to addressing the moments of each day as they call for decision, for action, or for a radical shift in focus. Let me tell you what I mean.

Much evidence (witness the implosion of the stock market a few years back) indicates that, by and large, we aren’t necessarily who we think we are—free, rational political agents who manage ourselves by our own lights. The desire to know our own mind and to build the transcendent will that self-command requires is easily repurposed by Scoreboard’s point of view and lifeblood. So to give ourselves the breathing space to create a life of our own design, we must shift our focus to the autonomy of self-command and away from the authority of Scoreboard. The value of the willpower that is gained from such a shift in focus is often underestimated, and the transformation it requires is easier said than done.

Scoreboard has become an almighty force that authoritatively and convincingly defines, manages and ranks our individuality by assessing the stuff we’ve acquired. With the best media-savvy in the world behind its program of acquisitive individualism, Scoreboard can march us to its tune.

Scoreboard has the upper, stronger hand because its play is based on the exploitation of the rivalrous impulse—the ancient biological drive for keeping the animal alive. Without self-command as our timely and practiced focus, this instinct, inherent in our DNA, is easily manipulated.

Does Scoreboard transform this brute impulse into the civilizing energy of self-command? No. Scoreboard has us use our juice to flaunt our superior stuff and choices, and show an overt or covert contempt for those beneath us in the pecking order. By these means, our (so-called) breeding is displayed. (See my post, Scoreboarding—it almost took us down.)

Although this pattern of one-upsmanship is practically universal, it affects us uniquely. It can show up as an ongoing anxiety or troubling discontent or as an insatiable want, want, want.

If it weren’t for Scoreboard’s harsh and manipulative conventions, most of us—with access to the right information and a transcendent discipline—would be made capable of possessing a satisfying self-command. We’d find a place where we could work and find intellectual and emotional reward in our efforts to lead a substantive, contributory life. But, as I said, Scoreboard’s flagrant or insidious ranked comparisons throw us off purpose.

If we’re not worried about competing with the neighbors or peer group about the quality and mass of our stuff, then we’re dreading the contempt evident in their eyes if not in their words or actions. To be treated cheaply hurts even if we know it is a mistake to be embarrassed and dispirited by the cold acts of remote-from-substance Scoreboard players. We know it’s a mistake to think that show-off taste, style and stuff are more important than self-command. But, as I said, we’re born into Scoreboard’s domineering focus, and we stay there unless we can make the shift.

Admittedly, a shift in focus—from the relentlessly acquisitive individualism touted by the Scoreboard to self-command—is not easy, but then enlarging the frontiers of human possibility has always been a challenge. The effort to wrest ourselves from Scoreboard’s controlling grip by acquiring the autonomy of self-command will always be contested by the many emissaries of Scoreboard who try to demean our effort. To really make a shift in focus, we must be able to see through the “obvious” worth of a time and attention-consuming rivalrous one-upsmanship and think for ourselves when Scoreboard tries to monopolize our focus.

But this is only half of what makes up self-command. We must also be able to muster the heart and nerve needed to create a timely momentum on behalf of our convictions. We’ll be living, working, playing and rearing our children in environments that may put little emphasis (except lip service) on the ability to think for oneself. In other words, in a Scoreboard-driven contentious environment that gives no points for a substance it can’t see, we must be able to declare what’s valuable and then live, timely choice by choice, timely act by act, according to these lights.

In short, when we no longer underestimate the value of a shift in focus to the autonomy of self command, we’ll be able to use its power to our advantage anytime we need it. No matter what sting, disappointment, obstacle or curve ball that life serves up, we don’t really have time to suffer over it. We’ve serious work to do, not to mention trees to climb, electronic gadgets to charge and sync and exciting new possibilities for intellectual happiness and contribution to explore. So we don’t let Scoreboard’s stultifying values dominate or out-maneuver us for long. We shift our focus and put our attention on what we want (and need) to put it on.

The first post I made to my blog in July 2009, was about substance, about the call for responsibility, for obligation, for us to be leaders in our relationships, homes and communities. The post was especially timely in light of the implosion of the stock market, and its attendant fallout that left so many in financial jeopardy.

In fact, though, life’s challenges never cease. Having the wisdom and the nerve to do the right thing is our imperative, and our goal. Every day we “ask” ourselves to rise to the occasion, to choose, to will, to act, to give hope and meaning to the struggle and to solve the problems that occur in the process. This is how we make it matter that we lived at all.

It’s a fierce challenge because there is nothing inside of us perfectly capable of doing the right thing if we simply make up our minds to do so. Wisdom is hard to find. Harder to acquire. And hardest to stick to because it requires so much will and courage. Yet it is to extending the frontiers of our own self-command that we have obligated ourselves.

It is difficult to get, I think, that doing the right thing is nothing more intrinsically true than a point of view about what’s important. Doing the right thing is not foundational to who we are, unless we make it so. Yes, it’s a potential, one of the choices made possible by human brainpower. But this excellent dimension must be given substance—breadth and depth, then watched closely and protected. This is because it competes with many other options that seem important from the point of view of the ego and the Scoreboard.

Back in the day when the seductions of the Scoreboard were not the only options ostentatiously displayed, it was also challenging to do the right thing—dark and selfish impulses are compelling! However, in those days, the reward of heaven was on the horizon. In hope of eternal salvation, history tells us, some people were able to transcend some of their less civilized, less decent drives.

In today’s secular world such a metaphysical horizon is considered by many to be more the stuff of poetry than of reason. As such, it’s not necessarily an omnipresent motivator of doing the right thing. This means that when we obligate ourselves to acquire and enact substance, it is likely to be a conscientious promissory consent made possible by an informed heart and the transcendent practices that give it life.

So, as I said, in today’s material world how we go about organizing and living our lives is, in many ways, up for grabs. Even what constitutes a moral, civil and rational identity, or the need for it, can be bitterly contested. Yes, we are educated to know about traditional imperatives regarding prudence or care, justice, fortitude or courage and moderation or self-discipline. But how they should play out is often a matter of special, sometimes polarizing, interests. Moreover, the self-command needed to embrace and enact these imperatives is not routinely taught nor does it emerge naturally as a by-product of adulthood.

In addition, there is little obvious (on the Scoreboard) incentive and reinforcement for doing the right thing, though it may showcase our disgrace if we fail to do so. What keeps us on the high road is our conscionable recognition of its contribution, and the desperate, subjective hell we experience when we don’t have the inner strength to choose the good and true.

Committed to re-enchant our world, we take an originative look at the challenges and our options in the face of it. We want to create an irrepressible sense of life’s value and majesty, an affinity for the love and pursuit of substance, and a talent for acquiring its wisdom. Through these dedicated efforts we create a subjective and transcendent authority born of expansiveness, responsibility and creativity—each an authentic mark of manner and expression that distinguishes our substance and our practice.

This commitment requires constant creative effort—effort to bring forth the substantive dimension of who we are in timely fashion as the moments of each day call for it. This is our means to the next level of authority over ourselves and to the word and deed by which we communicate this substance when other forces are arguing for our attention.

To take up this challenge is to engage in endless days, endless processing, testing the frontiers of the possible. It is to relate to the world aesthetically like an artist does. Excited by the nuance, subtlety, complexity and daring of human possibility, the artist differentiates a point of view about what matters and illuminates choices once hidden or transparent. And it is to relate to the world ethically and pragmatically. Charged with the timely command of ourselves over our immediate experience and over the manner in which we conduct ourselves, we invigorate life and inspire hope for tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

The rest of us, educated to a conscience and a persistent fascination with the possibility of living a purposed life, want to stamp our will or make our mark upon the world, too. Despite all the privileges to which we are heir, we are well aware of how much of life is muddled, unpredictable, threatening, confrontational and for one reason or another, often just disappointing.

Taking action in service of how life ought to be or, said another way, “doing the right thing,” is imperative. However, to get it done, we understand that we must transform the brute willful driving force into an effective and promissory willpower whose means are moral, civil and rational. It is the decent approach to our ends and the hallmark of success with our finitude.

Willpower, or the transcendent will, is authority. In service of our well-chosen convictions, it is a control we deliberately exert to restrain our reflexive willfulness and immediacy and to get something done. But its distinction is yet finer, more affinitive, more honorable. For willpower refers to the self-initiated subjective process to rule over ourselves, to think and to imagine, to create and interpret, to assess and decide, and to bring all this to bear on how we live out our lives. Its acquisition and expression is a life-long, dedicated commitment—we’ll always have to climb the ladder of the transcendent will.

Of course we will. How could it be any other way? Because it’s always been true—since forever, really—that every pioneering effort, every frontier, every broader horizon, every new possibility and every new responsibility to which we obligate ourselves must be fought for.

We fight not only for the territory reflexively guarded by willfulness, but for original and better cognitive practices and territory that reach beyond the harsh judgment of the Scoreboard and the isolating ego-protection program. Each of our originative efforts requires attention, energy, nerve and the will (authority) to match word to deed, despite the pressure of an unmediated immediacy from within and the politics from without.

Regarding the challenge from without: We have always to transcend the fear and anger that arise when we clash wills with others or must confront what is crude, unfair and ruthless in the status quo. This conflict of wills may not be newsworthy, and just because it doesn’t come to physical blows doesn’t mean that it’s not nerve-racking or intimidating. Most often, it’s an everyday event and occurs when family members engage, when members of a church or of a school’s board engage, when community issues are at stake.

Life is not beautifully enacted and illuminated and its outcome lovely—except when romanced by some films. It’s never how it ought to be, or will be. Even values and priorities we think the family or community should share are rarely conceded by everyone to be unassailable and viable principles. What we sincerely think best for teen, peer, mate, friend, employee or country often becomes a real or bogus point of contention and has to be worked out, ideally via persuasion or diplomacy rather than the hammer.

In such instances, and they are legion, we have to overcome any deficit of will or nerve and press ourselves to be heard and, perhaps, to prevail, sometimes over irritability, cantankerousness or just plain nastiness on the part of the other. (Or, worse-case scenario, on the part of ourselves.) In addition, the contested territory is rarely won, once and for all. Yesterday’s clashes may have to be resolved again today, and later today, and tomorrow.

So that’s the challenge from external forces that we face. And, internally, we have always to transcend the wayward drift—the lingering passivity and inertia not to mention the inevitable and innumerable distractions that separate us from our convictions.

In my post titled, The will to transcend, there’s life after everything, I discussed transcendence—this capacity we have to go beyond our reflexive, immediate selves. The focus of that particular post was the creation and invocation of the transcendent will that enables us to recover from severe realities of life that overburden the human spirit and bring the human body to its knees.

But the transcendent will is also what raises us above the humdrum, above marking time, above thinking that if not this day, then the next, or the next, we’ll get to work on creating a life of our own design. In fact, this project, if not made urgent, actually undermines the quality of life for ourselves and those who depend on us for leadership. Understanding the demand for transcendence and learning to satisfy it is the ennobling deed that makes life worth living and a light for those we hold near and dear.

Said another way, to generate and to bring the force of the transcendent will to our immediately realized presence is the highest order of our authority, our autonomy, our humanity. This commitment to performative excellence, that is, activism in service of how life ought to be, is our moral identity.

Yes, a certain amount of autonomy or authority is a civic obligation. Despite pressure from the immediate—anger, fear, desire, inertia, or a general “I don’t feel like it,” we get up and get to work, pay the bills, chauffeur the kids. We’re instrumental participants in the ordinary workaday machinery of life.

However, we aren’t just cogs in the machinery, and an ability to follow the rules is not the whole of our possibility. Products of the historical enterprise to further the human project, we recognize a call, from without and from within, to do and be more than a competent instrument. We accept the challenge to bring the transcendent will to our willful immediacy. We recognize that such transcendental authority absorbed into our immediacy is our real freedom.

But nothing can turn this freedom into a permanent condition. The state of our mind and our will and our moral identity is achieved on a decisive moment to decisive moment basis amid competing claims and circumstances, not least of which are the tugs of passivity, inertia and distraction.

So, our focus, here, is more than the personal authority demanded by law. Our focus is the subjective dimension of life. It is in the nature of climbing the ladder of the transcendent will that we are required to mediate our immediacy and to breach our inertia. We do this in endless instances where we are, in fact, challenged to exercise (fight for) our freedom, our promise and our hope for a better life for those currently excluded by condition and circumstance from its promise. The rewards are worth it.

It’s not so easy, though, to be an original, to create a life of your own design, to parse, weight and scale where and how you can best contribute. Whether you’ve always had in mind this intention—and even see it as an obligation or, startled, realized that too much of your life “just happened,” there’s much to think about, plan for and do.

Think about it. When you choose to create a life of your own design, you must accommodate all those commitments already undertaken. There’s the normal pressure of what’s expected of you, of course, the standard exterior clash of wills with those who have claims upon you or those upon whom you make claim. What do you owe those who contribute to your support? And what do you owe those who depend on you? And then there are, of course, the ever-vigilant conventions and rules that apply to you and everyone else, no matter what.

But you must also come to grips with all the conflicting data that surrounds the examined life. How do you honestly know your own mind and the calls upon it? Can it really “stand back” and examine itself?

What’s possible for you? What makes you tick? What excites your imagination? In your encounter with this vast and complex land of ours, guiding and governing yourself is the highest possible originative response to the demand for contribution, order and the day-to-day creation of faith and hope and possibility. What wants doing and what needs doing?

So, while there’s a great need to know your mind, it’s not neatly organized with all the deepest, wisest ideas at the top and the lesser ones ranked below. Add to that the mind’s off-and-on-again temptation to just keep going with the daily toil, with how you were already inserted into the world, with the march of programmed events. Creating an autonomous life takes nerve, will, energy and resolute purpose.

This means that the clash of wills can be interior, too. Strengths and goals reached may conflict with sensibilities and longings not yet achieved. And what does life insist you settle for and what’s just too dreadful or shallow to endure? When can you lend grace and affinity to the everyday chores that ordinary life seems to demand? And when must you exceed the ordinary?

And what of romance and passion and your wild-with-happiness dreams? Do you forfeit subjective independence and the thrill of new horizons for the arousing appeal of intimacy, connection and belonging? Or do you forfeit some of the home front comforts of life to go with your new and exciting understanding of intention, accountability and meaning? Or need nothing be forfeited?

And think about all the other claims upon your mind. Your heart—its glorious highs and stupefying lows. Your personality—its moods, anxieties, quirks and attitudes. Your intellect’s attraction to wisdom, virtue and justice. The aims of your intuition, imagination and the deep and haunting experience of the “soul.”

Or are these, in effect, inert, in need of a jump start? Will everyday life be much better lived if you just put your mind to a little remodeling and upgrading of its furniture? Or is the future truly up for grabs—this being the first time that you’ve lent your eyes and ears (and mind) to such possibilities?

There’s more. How do you make sense of life’s ironies, contingencies and uncertainties; of your own entangled and unpredictable emotions; of inbuilt and exterior competing claims for what’s valuable and meaningful; of what you ought to do and what you want to do? How do you put to right the inescapable personal responsibility for choosing your outlook on the world, as well as your conduct in it, along with your compassionate comprehension that many people could not escape becoming what was done to them? The existential and material privileges that have brought you to this opportunity—to stand apart from your conditioning and circumstance, to question, examine, reconsider, evaluate and commit—have not been available to everyone.

Along the same lines, what of your public obligations? Responding to the highest order of demand for transcendence, for self-determination, self-control and self-government, for studying a body of intelligence and a network of reference points designed to support morally, civilly and rationally qualified authority, has been the basis of spiritual progress and social decency.

Life has been described with thousands of metaphors, all the way from life is a chocolate cake to life is a nightmare from which we never awaken. I think of life as a never-ending series of choices. We can just yoke ourselves into the grim hardheartedness of the marketplace and the harsh critical lights of the Scoreboard, in hopes that success therein will make life meaningful, but it’s a bad bet, a poor choice. No amount of stuff can ever satisfy what only an inner transformation can do.

Moreover, as I said in my most recent post, with this transformed realization of ourselves, we feel inspired, vibrantly alive and in command of the way in which we wish to live out our lives. And when we undertake this commitment, our transcendent or willed display of thoughtfulness, connection and affinity puts us on the right side of history.

Are our eyes impartial? No. And we don’t sense sound and taste, for example, with impartial ears and tongues. Are our minds impartial? No. We don’t sense phenomena objectively. Sensing is a feature of our subjectivity, not an objective process.

Our grasp of what’s going on is a comprehension based chiefly on the automatic, reflexive grab of biology, education, conditioning, experience, unfriendly or friendly persuasion and the intoxicating mickeys life slips us. We were inserted, fitted, hammered and seduced into the mix of things that exist interior or exterior to us. And this comprehension becomes a significant piece of the mind’s “I” with which we interpret and engage life.

Parents do their best to shape their children in a particular, thoughtful way, as do schools. Amid this careful rearing and schooling, however, something else equally impressive and equally influential is going on. Children’s senses—their eyes, ears, bodies and minds—are also connecting to, for instance, color, sound, vibe, heft, authority and countless other phenomena that also knuckle-mold their “take” on life.

In virtually every social situation, young children have a feeling for who has the power, who rewards and punishes, who and what should be avoided, as well as for what is of value, what is esteemed and what they say, in effect, sucks.

Also, on much of the turf where they observe, play and interact, children sense that it is a mistake to appear clueless, unknowing, curious or unsure. Inadvertently, involuntarily and uncontrollably, then, a reckless (or anxious) certainty and hard-to-deal-with willful cockiness may replace the inquiring mind. We could say that youngsters, by virtue of what they have sensed, already have a point of view about life or a mindset though they would not be able to articulate it as such.

By the time that significant choices need to be made, this is the subjectively owned furniture occupying the mind of children turning into teens and teens turning into adults. The old furniture stays put unless the pieces are consistently upgraded by, for example, the conscientious acquisition and virtuous practice of wisdom and judgment.

Yet, in part because of the inadvertent closing of the mind mentioned above, most of this furniture remains unexamined, untested, unevaluated. We tend to put more attention on trying to get what we’re supposed to want than on creating a life of our own design.

However, as we begin to exercise our freedom to mediate this subjectivity, exciting new possibilities for intellectual happiness and for life and lifestyle emerge. This is what comes of taking a fresh look at the subjective manner in which we recognize ourselves, our resources (including our minds) and our moral, civil and rational character or identity.

It always was and probably always will be evolving wisdom, aptitude and the clash of wills that inspire and guide humanity’s long journey from its brute state to the poetic light of the heavens. We don’t get from that place where we were originally inserted and situated into a life of our own design without going through the changes. No one can make them for us.

Fortunately, every step of the subjective redesigning and repurposing, though perhaps challenging and time-consuming, is intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically rewarding. Pragmatically rewarding, too.

We often hear that the aim of the examined life is to substitute truth for myth, to try to provide explanations (for phenomena) that aren’t based on false cause. In this case, truth does not refer to an absolute. It refers to what is left when we eliminate the mistaken suppositions and errors in our thinking, listening, reading, writing, etc.

The truth is not a final certainty because there is no place to stand outside the world and no vocabulary vast enough to describe all that was, is and will be. Indeed, there may never be a theory that reconciles the messy complexity of human issues into a neat simple truth.

But acquiring a relatively bigger picture by revealing holes in the myths and suppositions (the stuff we’re ‘sposed to do) in favor of more pragmatic truths is an enlightening endeavor. And an effort both ennobling and humbling in light of its vastness.

This process is infused with feelings of joy, delight and good faith. Something almost magical seems to happen when we see a bigger picture and begin to take up an unreservedly creative, morally principled and unique, individual command of our subjectivity. Indeed, when we see a bigger picture, we are bigger persons in the sense that the furniture of the mind, once cluttered, cobwebbed and unmovable, becomes amenable to design and purposeful arrangement.

With this transformed realization of ourselves, we feel inspired, vibrantly alive and in command of the way in which we wish to live out our lives. And as I said at the conclusion of my last post, when we undertake this journey, our transcendent or willed display of thoughtfulness, connection and affinity puts us on the right side of history.

The brain is hardwired with ancient data perfect for the task of running a tiger or an antelope. But the human brain is open for business and refurbishing, too. Billions of its neurons are not wired in a specific way when we’re born. Happenstance will plug some of them in, but many we can designate. This is where we upgrade, repurpose and rearrange. Let me tell you what I mean.

Some of the furniture of the mind, is mentally accessible when we want it to be. Some, such as disgust and bitterness, registers on the face, whether we like it or not. Some—like the brain’s pituitary gland that produces hormones to regulate the body—affects us though we don’t consciously manage its processing.

The brain is the control center of the central nervous system responsible for perception, cognition, attention, memory, emotion and action. Subsequently, it is not difficult to imagine that virtually everything we say or do has a correlate in the neurons.

If we can play a musical instrument or catch fly balls, or pass on a second glass of wine though it’s the best zinfandel on the market, it’s in the brain. So, too, is our ability to think on our feet, or recite psalms or Shakespeare, or speak a second language or “will” ourselves out of a mental stupor when imagination and creativity are needed. When we’re angry or moodily reviewing an old resentment, neural correlates are at play.

If we were fortunate enough, or driven enough, to become well educated, we have a particular type of reference library in our brains. If we were schooled by hard knocks, what we refer to is somewhat different. Tough experience can bend us in every conceivable manner from distinctly aggressive to peculiarly passive. But no matter how we were reared, the education of one of the mind’s most crucial furnishings—willpower, aka the transcendent will—may not have been seriously addressed.

Luck isn’t generally reliable as a means to proving ourselves or to improving ourselves. But, lucky for us anyway, though neither blessings nor brainpower were equally distributed, each of us has a fair chance to acquire or refurbish this vital resource. We can upgrade at any time and like the remodel of a home, it can take some time.

So, the mind is crowded with furniture. But it doesn’t always serve our ambitions. In fact, too much of what we do may seem mindless or out-of-sync, a jumble of un-coordinated moods, drives, anxieties, attitudes, hormones, fears and appetites. Though we can’t get the furnishings recalled as defective or throw them out, we can remodel and repurpose some key pieces. It’s definitely doable.

Certainly, over practically every darn thing in the world, we have little individual control. Yet, you and I are capable of a progressive expansion of the autonomy born of overcoming reflexive brute nature and counterproductive habits and developing a life of our own design.

In other words, we can have far more control over our minds. What’s more, the state and content of our minds directly influence the quality of our day-to-day experience. How well we appoint it, fine tune it and use it is pivotal to the presence by which we are known, and know ourselves.

As I said above, one of the mind’s most crucial pieces of furniture is willpower, also known as the transcendent will. But there’s a telling distinction between willfulness—the way we just are in our indulged immediately realized presence—and willpower or the transcendent will. One has moral character. The other does not.

WILLFULNESS: the trait of being prone to disobedience and lack of discipline. WILLPOWER: control deliberately exerted to do something or to restrain one’s own impulses.

Each of us can (and often does) make a case for our persistent willfulness, a case for our lack of discipline, creativity, resource, morality and commitment. We could say that our willfulness is sovereign and it reigns over everything because it’s an in-the-brain limbic system oscillation, innate, immediate and urgent. Fired up and close, it can feel like the real, true us and sometimes we like to pamper it, let it percolate and spill over, whether or not it serves our ambitions.

Commonly, though, if we lack the ability to shepherd our energy and intention to overcome the willful authority we experience in immediacy, what we feel is sheepish and bad, no matter how many justifications we can cite.

What actually perfects the sovereignty or command, what deserves our respect and merits our pride, is our intention to bring the transcendent will to our thinking, speaking, listening and acting. It helps us to end the anxiety that I discussed at length in my post titled, Behaving badly, a sign of desperation. And it helps us to construct the ease and elegance of character that I discussed in my post titled, Behaving well, affinity, affection and attraction.

This is what the well-furnished mind looks like, and we feel comfortable and at home in it, too. Moreover, our willed display of thoughtfulness, connection and affinity places us among the good guys and saints. So, we begin to remodel and address ourselves to reason, harmony and hospitality.

In fact, if we are seen angry, irked or outraged, odds are someone has not measured up. Maybe she’s been willful, or he stubborn, or she selfish and irresponsible, or he egoistic and incompetent, or she a big-mouthed know-nothing or he a pretentious know-it-all, or she manipulative, immature and cheeky or he domineering, obstinate and just plain wrong.

And that’s the mild version. The clash of wills can become vicious. We can’t help but overhear (or get pulled into) heated battles between parent and teen, husband and wife, siblings, partners in love or law, Little League coaches and the kids’ dads or moms, neighbors, politicians or ordinary voters. In today’s free-for-alls in the civic arena, what used to be genially referred to as the loyal opposition is now often characterized as evil incarnate. And in the domestic arena, what used to be private matters may now be much-publicized gladiator-inspired matches.

What we forget at these adversarial moments is that the people we had counted on to make our lives successful are themselves a complex mixture of needs and desires. And they don’t like them foiled! Practically since the day they were born, they, too, want what they want; what WE want is rarely their primary concern.

Half of us want to live the unexamined life, moving, moving, moving, assimilated naturally and easily into the culture, the conventions and the perks of the time. And half of us don’t. We want to write our own marching orders, to look and ponder, to surmise and reevaluate; we don’t mind rewriting. But all of us are inevitably the central character in our own drama, and its prospective storyline privileges our own agenda.

Hundreds of sit-coms, films, plays and video games as well as countless articles, blogs and books portray the clash of wills. But few of these, entertaining, ironic, gross, remorseful or villain-filled, actually expose the roots of the clash.

First, willfulness is an ancient reflexive, bred-in-the-bone, aggressive and defensive response to being in the world. And we’ve not shed this rivalrous impulse as evolutionary baggage unnecessary in these modern times. In fact, we’ve identified its fierce presence as the very core of who we are and don’t want to betray it. I discussed this in my post dated September 8, 2009.

More recently, this very same impulse has been appropriated and honed by the Scoreboard. It drives us to acquire the stuff and status that symbolize the righteousness of our willfulness. Read more about Scoreboarding in my post.

Second, the clash of wills is inevitable because the rational facts of everyday life don’t really affect that cognitive space where what attracts is held dear, and what contradicts is held to be a personal affront that warrants much animosity.

Animals roaming the plains don’t know where their motivations come from, and much of the time we don’t either. In our flesh and blood, we carry the cellular codes for thousands of years of adaptive life. The modern brain is layered over, but doesn’t necessarily dominate, the eons-old, still functioning systems that power rats and reptiles. We don’t now and may never understand all the characteristics we have inherited by birth or adopted as culture’s norms were imposed upon us.  Sometimes we are strangers unto ourselves.

Yes, we’ve been trained by language and history to describe in culture-specific ways the motivations, the moods that feed on them, the practices we’ve grafted onto them, and the anxieties they produce. But, according to scientists, upwards of 90% of our reckonings are unconscious! We don’t necessarily know-in-fact what rules we obey, what authorities we defer to, what sensibilities and yearnings we protect, what causes we are at the effect of.

So, no matter how often the facts of everyday life contradict that which we feel are core structures representing what’s true, valuable and vital, we can’t or won’t accommodate the facts. Actually, in this reflexive mode, reconciliation and transcendence can seem like a sell out. And in this mode, give and take—the mutual cooperation and understanding between people often involving concessions on all sides, or settling for modest joys and simple comforts can seem like losing, big time.

Third, this unrealistic state of mind and heart is kept viable, excitable and “explainable” by what I call the ego-protection program. You can read about it in my August 7, 2009 post.

It’s important to remember that this dug-in, teeth-clenched, clash of wills is not unique to you, or to me. Virtually everyone we know is similarly dug-in. Some do it with some grace, their grim determination somewhat under wraps. Some do it with a lot of spin; they’re convincing when it comes to why their will should be done. Some menace. Some cajole. Some tantrum. Some pretend to cooperate. Some accuse and misrepresent. And on and on. That IS the way that everyday life IS.

For the time being, let’s set aside will-to-power culture-changing clashes, those between god and king, or dictator and subject, or railroad builder and indentured servant. For the time being, let’s address the “he said, she said” clashes of will that make so much of everyday life contentious and dispiriting.

In my last post, I discussed affinity and the reconciling reach of its attractive force. Its force permits us, despite the inevitable clash of wills, to enchant and describe our world with transcendent or sacred, traditional or humanist values such as understanding, flexibility, tolerance, gentility, forgiveness and fair-minded, morally construed operating principles.

We can create an affinity for the love and pursuit of moral strength and a talent for acquiring the resources of the intelligence, heartfulness or generosity and competence that we find in such a quest. Through these dedicated efforts, we can create an existential freedom and will, born of expansiveness, gratitude and humility—each an elegant mark of manner and expression that distinguishes our commitment to what is decent and humane. In each case, the rivalrous brute willfulness built into the immediate living system is transcended in favor of affinity, affection and attraction. Why do it? Because morally it is the right thing to do.

Though we can’t fully understand the laws of nature and how the universe works, we can command how we will act. For the most part, we don’t get split-second control over how we show up in immediacy—in the very first flush of untamed nature’s call! But we are gifted with the ability to pause, reflect, create and get over or transcend the roiling nerves and blood—all in the hope that we will gain some traction and play out our lives in this puzzling world with more mercy, kindness, compassion, timeliness and contribution.

Moreover, we can improve upon our ability to communicate, to convey our love and gratitude, to ethically persuade, to convince, to balance the favor bank, to exchange equivalent value, to pick our battles, to choose playing fields where we can show up competently and resourcefully. These skills, useful in the clash of wills, will be the focus of a future post.

You might find my post titled, The will to transcend, there’s life after everything the perfect read right now.

I don’t think we can pin down what percentage of the affinitive instincts is brute nature and what is enhanced by religion, art, literature, music, dance and valentines. But these affinitive instincts—they are not unnatural. Think empathy, sympathy, love and camaraderie. Think kindness, nurture, gentility and understanding.

Indeed, when we come to recognize well and true who we are, we sense, and we heed, an attraction, an affection—always already there. This gentle connection, insisting on itself, becoming something to which we can give our heart and soul, brings forth generosity, gratitude and grace.

So, affinity is at the very least a possibility, a subterranean current. And, affinity is also a remarkable achievement, an intuitive and moral art whose generous expression is the bona fides of a life well lived.

The feelings we are just born with, they come and go. They are wonderful, dynamic and ecstatic, and they are fickle, unpredictable and disaffected. They can corrupt reason, undermine the best intentions and lead us astray, as well as up and down and all over the place. Depending upon our subjective impression of them, they are merciful, and they are pitiless.

In other words, the feelings, moods and sweet and sour vibes that just arise unexpectedly and depart inexplicably are too capricious to be the sole source of our intellectual and emotional generosity. We don’t want to depend solely on mercurial feelings to move us to kind and moral expressions of optimism, fortitude or perseverance.

We don’t want to depend solely on erratic feelings to move us to commitment, to thankfulness, to an appreciation of life. And, of course, we don’t want to depend solely on these fickle feelings to stimulate our expressions of love, generosity, tenderness, and compassion.So, if we’re not feelin’ it, we can create it. Some of the greatest joys of autonomy are the ability to be an artist of our own emotions and a curator of the active energy loving expression requires.

Affinity is not unnatural. When its promptings are deep, the juices flowing, the excitement present, when the heart pounds and the spirit is touched, it’s easy. But much of how life is doesn’t lend itself to easy, does it?

We are aware of the contingent, finite, bewildering nature of life, as well as the seemingly intransigent nature of each of us. An intemperate immediacy can make us aggressively willful, prideful and contentious. And our individual adult patterns and habits resist change. That which doesn’t come easily must be marshaled, called into being via transcendence, discipline and practice.

And, of course, conflict, hardship and misfortune are unavoidable—they pervade the human condition and we suffer over it. In its midst, we may break loose of the connections or lose touch with the openhearted grace of affinity. Further, antagonism is natural. Just for the “joy” of causing others pain, people oppose what is being built and destroy that which is built. And our own best intentions—our care and compassion and commitment—can be met with antipathy and rejection. See my post titled, Acquiring the right stuff.

Yet, none of us want to be disheartened or dispirited by this kind of opposition, or by our own co-mingled joys and sorrows. The daily enactment of a disciplined and caring way of thinking and going about being human not only makes life possible, it gives it meaning as well. So, this is where human autonomy comes into play, and mastering it is crucial.

Made up of cultivated resources such as intellectual integrity, emotional generosity and a healthy dose of self-control and self-determination, our autonomy is something we acquire or win.

When we are autonomous, we can call upon ourselves to love life, to thrill upon its possibility, to speak with our love, to recognize its expression as an act of intelligence and grace—a commitment to hold the relationship, the family, the community together. We can call upon ourselves to kindle light, love and friendship and to create and renew against the forces of conflict, cynicism and antagonism. See my post titled, Beyond discontent.

Yes, ravenous sexual urges, parental feelings of love, huge surges of compassionate emotionality, and stirrings of great sentiment are initially brought to us by chemistry and registered in the body. Such passion or bonds lend themselves to understanding, commitment, generosity, fascination and belonging.

But when the chemistry naturally goes flat, a vast emotional abyss can appear. When all has become disappointing, dreary and difficult, we must use an artful vocabulary, an artful marriage of rationality and inspiration or imagination, to consecrate love, light, heat and connection.

As our attention turns increasingly to our possibility for good, we take responsibility for imposing order on the highs and lows of immediacy. We become responsible for holding the relationship, the family, and the community together. We bring forth a greater care and compassion for other human beings, a concern for intimacy, a regard for equanimity and the experience of being free, an esteem for dwelling in and confronting the living experience.

At the same time, we learn how to think and interact with the flexibility of many interpretations and how to provide a great deal of context from which to resolve immediate concerns. In this space, love, receptivity and relationship do not just happen to us. They are also accomplishments of the human spirit, choices of conduct and experience that accompany the providing of comfort, the making of kindness, the willingness to forgive and the granting of dignity.

As I said, in this space, we are more able to be an artist of our own emotions and a curator of the active energy loving expression requires. We create them, with spouse, child, family or friend, to authenticate meaning, to grant attentiveness, listening and respect, to reveal emotional attachment, to lean into affection—to call the heart and mind to passion in situations where chemicals no longer provide the magic.

This effort gives us a chance to recognize that we want to expand our creative efforts to all of life’s challenges. Yes, we find a degree of control, comfort and challenge in rational mastery. Yet, we also discover an ability to celebrate life’s mysteries and rhythms, which march quite apart from human invention and drama.

Also relevant to this post are A voice that unites conscience and deed, and The will to transcend, there’s life after everything.

Shock jocks, confrontational pundits, pandering moderators and louts with blog access, report on or elicit bogus moral outrage, grossly indiscreet tell-alls, false accusations and outright lies and send us chasing after red herrings.

Afternoon talk shows and print or digital columns present emotional immaturity, poor judgment and spiritual poverty as if the failures were the fault of someone else.

On scripted and unscripted show alike, the condescending ill manners, cold-shoulder arrogance and inaccessibility of those who would never admit to common discontent or desperation are portrayed as fierce and gutsy achievements.

And, as if we didn’t get enough of that via media, there’s more. We are exposed to similar fury and know-nothing inanity on the train, at the grocer’s or in car pools when mommies and daddies use the foulest language and crudest gossip to rip into mate, sibling, neighbor, rival, client or public servant.

And, of course, we’ve all met the perennially out-of-sorts, unapproachable boss, the pretentious professional and the alienated relative who have lost all connection with the kind, the decent and the humane.

Instead of being accountable for our integrity, leadership, fair play, toleration, resilience and resolution, we hypocritically or dishonestly equate transcendence—cooperation, civility, courtesy, receptivity and personal responsibility—with submissiveness.

Bad attitude, complaint, excuse and elitism seem to have replaced character and moral fiber in the popular press and in “on trend” communities. But I think it’s a crock. Bad attitude, helplessness and arrogance are not expressions of “fighting the good fight.”

In fact, I think human beings suffer greatly because they give too much play to their immediacy, to their mean-mindedness, excuses and ego. Behaving badly saps our strength, our effectiveness, our affinity, and it brutalizes the lives of everyone near, or dear.

Fighting the good fight is about real substance—real depth—whose acquisition is a hard-won accomplishment. Why? Because to get it, we must struggle against brute, visceral resistance, the ego’s “protection program,” and the lure and titillation of the Scoreboard. And we must do it in a confrontational social environment already compromised by false fronts and pocked by corruptions of meaning and purpose.

So, back to behaving badly: Antagonism, animosity and a stingy spirit seem natural enough. Perhaps they are the narrative projection of the animal’s ability to extend and defend itself, its offspring and its territory.

Of course, we humans don’t literally eat the young of a rival for dinner. In its place, we are two-faced, punitive, sullen and disagreeable, or unapproachable, snooty and quick to take offense, or we pose as victims. Most of us would never treat our pets in the hostile, dismissive or callous way we treat or refer to people.

And, of course, we don’t acknowledge that we’re unable to manage our thoughts and emotions; instead, we blame our resentment, instability, and meanness of spirit or general discontent on someone or something. But when we live this way, it is we, ourselves, who are deplorable. And no wonder: it is a shoddy way to be.

It’s shoddy because we’ve been educated to know better. When we’re behaving badly, we know that we misrepresent or distort the truth or betray the spirit of another’s intention or goodwill and we know that we’re hypocrites.

When we’re behaving badly, we represent the facts out of context; we lay blame; we act without regard for the feelings of others and take the light from the eyes of those we cut with malicious words; and we are irresponsible, distant, out of control.

Yet, nastiness, blame, arrogance and discontent are difficult to overcome for a number of reasons. First, these patterns of behavior are etched in our brains. Second, behaving badly is currently showcased in myriad ways as the new sexy. Third, we can always point to the jerks and rivals (often one and the same) or situations that make us feel unsettled or insecure.

So we indulge the pettiness and mean-mindedness, though we, ourselves, pay a big price for such thoughtlessness; indeed, desperation, lethargy, passivity, lack of confidence and loneliness may be the result. And certainly, it is a poor and embarrassing role model for those who depend on us. No one wants a parent, representative, boss or friend who lacks intellectual integrity, emotional control and spiritual resource.

So, easy or not, the work required to change such habits is worth the effort because the desperation and loathing ends, and we’re no longer one of those making the world a little colder.

As I said in my post titled, Beyond discontent, we’re not born with the means to fight the good fight or to leave our legacy on the right side of history. If we don’t make it our business to bring transcendence into play and acquire the powerful substance that gives heft to the means and tactics, our intention to live a decent life that matters, will never have the impact or reward we want it to have.

Transcendence is a talent, a genius that we can learn to grow, trust, and invoke in the best, and worst, of times, and in the times so bad that recovery seems impossible. Indeed, in such times, the transcendent practice that renews our bearings and redeems our energy is the most practical action we can take. Read my post titled, The will to transcend, there’s life after everything.

In sum, the creative, inspired and meaningful life has to do with transcending the mean-spiritedness and the condescending indifference in favor of practices we might characterize as decent, humane and thoughtful, noble and deep.

It has a great deal to do with intelligently determining the authority by which we live, and then living by it, despite the relentless provocations of our own temperament, media hype and a world often cruel, unjust and disappointing. This requires enormous dedication, initiative, and the ability to self-inspire. It enables us to live with ourselves and to get on with the life we choose.

Yes, we live in irrational and difficult times that have deprived many of their hope for a fine and agreeable life. Yet, this life is ours to design, build and furnish, with wisdom, nerve and heart.

Sometimes this struggle to be bold is referred to as a spiritual one. When I talk about spirit and transcendence, however, it’s about an earth-bound, creative process. How do we use our energy, and how do we use our will, to see a bigger picture, be a bigger person, make a bigger contribution and have a bigger life?

Each of us is unique, yet none an exception. The manner in which nature, history and language coalesce weighs heavily upon all. So, in many ways, we begin the struggle at the same starting point. Let me tell you what I mean.

Reminder: Our brains are complex. Each of us is home to a multitude of perceptions and impulses, not all of which are in accord. Each of us must wrestle with conflict or disharmony as incompatible ideas and mutually exclusive impulses compete. Our brains built over millions of years from the bottom up, they tell us, include their evolutionary pasts. Present deep in each of us are functioning structures like those that power the programmed reflexive responses available to reptiles and rats!

Language, a relatively recent evolutionary possibility, permits us a sense of unified consciousness, information processing and purpose. It enables us to distance or detach ourselves, to some extent, from the marching orders of our evolutionary past. Yet, primitive instincts and needs unsettle us, night and day. These influences are neither rational nor consensual. They are messy, in turn, cold-blooded, hot, passionate, ruthless, poised to fight or flee, wired, sated, exhausted, and they contradict or challenge, hour upon hour, our ability to bring order to them.

Of course, even with this information about the impulses that arise from successive stages of biological evolution, not to mention the contradictions that arise between nature and culture, we are called to get a grip and manage ourselves. Sometimes this expectation is referred to as the animating discourse of civilization. It deems us autonomous, not only fully capable of achievement if given the opportunity, but also fully capable of self-determination and self-control.

However, there is far more to our commitment to be autonomous, to overcome or transcend what just happens to us and to make life how it ought to be. We find inspiration, fulfillment and meaning in creating and living values independent of primitive impulse, and we suffer when these values are neglected. (See A voice that unites conscience and deed.)

So, as our brain went about organizing itself to negotiate the challenges of civilized life, what kind of intelligence did it gather and what impact did it have? It’s a piece of “Each of us is unique, yet none an exception. The manner in which nature, history and language coalesce weighs heavily upon all,” that I said earlier.

In other words, what in addition to our motor-running bodies makes us tick? Of course, we want to provide material comforts for our extended families and ourselves. But we are also summoned by the coalescence of nature, history and language to acquire and model moral character, depth and substance and personal authority.

Yet, aside from biology what pressures us the most is Scoreboard. (See Scoreboarding: it almost took us down.) Scoreboard’s domineering intelligence is pervasive, invasive and coercive. It tells us what we should want. It drives us—herd-like—to get it. Its high-handed award of merit and status is actually based on wealth alone. And it leaves character, substance and personal authority off the balance sheet.

We may recognize that we are defined, or that our opportunity in life is somehow limited, by something obvious, such as physical stature or level of energy. But we are also demarcated by knowledge and information insufficient to the challenges we face. Scoreboard’s intelligence is way too programmatic and shallow when it comes to the unique individual labor and love required to create a fine and agreeable life in irrational times.

Of course, it is very difficult to think that we’re programmed, or herd-like. This is because Scoreboard offers variations on its theme, and because we stamp conformity with our personalities and taste.

Said another way, because our personalities differ and our taste is somewhat individualized, we mistakenly think our unique potential is achieved. After all, don’t we love modern when she loves vintage, or watch sports while he sticks with PBS, or put our kids in private schools while they have good reasons for sending theirs to public school, or collect fine art while he collects baseball cards, or make sure we’re on the Scoreboard in a high-profile way while she prefers to stay under the radar?

To have the life we want, to make the contribution that matters, to us and to others, we must be bold enough to leave Scoreboard’s nest and see if we can fly. It’s an exciting prospect. Yes, surely, it’s easier to submit to the dictates of Scoreboard, to hope that variations in taste and acquisition will somehow distinguish us, or to surrender to the irrationality that characterizes these difficult times. But humanity’s bold spirit asks for more.

If autonomy is to be our destiny, if we are not to be subjugated by biology or Scoreboard, now is the time to strike, to make it happen, to give artful expression to the struggle to matter, to make order and to care. (I describe the ladder of transcendence in The will to transcend; there’s life after everything.)