Be The Person You've Always Wanted To Be

"What. . . is to be expected from our pursuit of happiness, when we find the state of life to be such that happiness itself is the cause of misery? Why should we endeavour to attain that of which the possession cannot be secured?" - Samuel Johnson

In his novel "The End of the Road," the author John Barth argues that despite our protests to the contrary, we always do exactly what we want. Oh, we might think that we're doing things at times that we don't want to do, but all of our actions are ultimately voluntary, and we are merely doing something that we otherwise think that we don't want to do merely because it seems better that some alternative.

Case in point: we might think that we don't want to go visit some relatives or in-laws, but the truth is we'd rather do that than argue with family or spouse about it, or be perceived as someone who doesn't care about relatives or in-laws. Or conversely, we might think that we don't want to get into a fight with someone, but actually, we'd rather fight than comply with whatever that person is requiring.

And so on. If we examine ourselves, we're always doing exactly what we want.

The logical extention of this is that all of these choices lead us to be exactly the person that we've become. We are precisely who we want to be. You might have thought at one point that you didn't want to be, say, a homeless person, or in jail, etc., (or a reader of Water Dissolves Water), but if you look at the decisions you made that got you there, and accept that the behaviors were all voluntary - that you always do exactly what you want - then the logical conclusion is that you are, right now, right this very minute, the person that you've always wanted to be, doing what you've always wanted to do, and it has always been like this, forever.

Congratulations.

"Do not suffer life to stagnate: it will grow muddy for want of motion; commit yourself to the current of the world." - Imlac