Always keep the same measure of self-control; otherwise through irregularity you will go from one extreme to another.
—St. Thalassios the Libyan
Category: TEMPERANCE
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The intellect that has shut out the senses, and has achieved a balance in the body’s temperament, has to fight only against its memories.
—St. Thalassios the Libyan -
Whenever you feel a sense of “this is just the way it is”, there is probably some bad faith there. For years I assumed I can’t expect to get any writing done after 5pm — the energy or focus just isn’t there, so I’m practically sentenced to spend the evening reading, watching something on a screen, going out or otherwise not working.
This is an old, self-defeating lie, and there’s no telling what it’s cost me. There’s no barrier at 5pm. The line is completely imaginary. There’s just a strong aversion to my work when I get close to that time of day, and I pretend it’s some kind of natural law.
Our lives are riddled with imaginary lines. Bedtime isn’t a real thing. It’s a choice, every time. Going to work is a choice. Eating lunch is a choice. Letting ourselves down is a choice. Meeting a deadline is a choice, and missing it is a choice, as much as we’d like to believe each of those outcomes was inevitable all along.
Noticing bad faith doesn’t cure it, but it makes it harder to ignore. We can let ourselves suffer certain problems for years, if we think they’re happening to us the way weather does. But once you recognize a particular condition in your life as ultimately voluntary, its days are probably numbered.
I can’t describe to you how strong a feeling it is, but once it’s past 5pm, it truly feels like I can’t write. It seems like the part of my brain that does that is shuttered like a storefront on a Sunday evening.
But when I actually do sit down at six or seven or eight and start typing, the words come out like any other time. The door was always open, I just walked by it again and again and again.
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Some, I know not why (for I have not learned to pry conceitedly into the gifts of God) are by nature, I might say, prone to temperance, or silence, or purity, or modesty, or meekness, or contrition. But others, although almost their own nature itself resists them in this, to the best of their power force themselves; and though they occasionally suffer defeat yet, as men struggling with nature, they are in my opinion higher than the former.
St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent
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“Do not fight to expel the darkness from the chamber of your soul. Open a tiny aperture for light to enter and the darkness will disappear.”
Don’t start by removing negatives from your life—begin by adding positives.
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Let not we who are reasonable show ourselves to be more savage than the unreasoning animals. For even the animals use in common the plants that grow naturally from the earth. Flocks of sheep graze together upon the same hillside, herds of horses feed upon the same plain, and all living creatures permit each other to satisfy their need for food. But we hoard what is common, and keep for ourselves what belongs to many others.
—St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice -
The degree of victory over self is of trifling importance. It consisted perhaps in our skipping our morning cigarette, or only in such an apparently unimportant thing as not turning our head or refraining from meeting a glance. The externally noticeable happening is not the decisive one. The little thing can be big, and the big, little.
Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
Tito Colliander
SO GOOD QUOTES 