Self-control

Can one learn self-control obtain better life balance?


In conversations with individuals from different walks of life, I hear expressed a personal frustration from many with the inability to carry through the deeply held intentions of their core selves towards others. These core intentions for this essay are foundations such as listening, hearing, witnessing and seeing others with a minimum of our own inner bias or self-interruption. I acknowledge this is a complicated subject, rooted in the different psychological and sociological make up of each of us along with our unique circumstances. In short, everyone grows up differently. That said, in exploring some of these conversations, I have been pondering the role self-control plays in sabotaging our finest and best deserved lives.


As a comparison, I have been thinking about the people I meet in life who appear to have emotionally balanced lives and do well demonstrating their best interpersonal intentions towards others. What I have come to synthesis as the basic difference that seems to influence the path of the later group’s lives versus those of their counterparts, who are challenged appears to dwell in the concept of self-control.


Self-control is something we hear about often yet most of us take it for granted in how much it plays a roll in how we live our lives, emotional or logical. Personal patterns we demonstrate such as patience, consideration, and understanding expressed towards those we care about can be a challenge for many for different reasons rooted around the concept of self-control. Obtaining long-term goals for ourselves, growing our core self esteem, and the fundamental way in which we chose to live our daily lives are other things that are rooted in our individual self control. They all seem to have so much to do with our ability the quality of lives we live and yet how much focus do we place on developing our skills of self control as individuals, let alone as a society. We struggle with many things, yet I see few people working on self control as a root to many of the challenges of life.


I heard from a friend recently, of his struggles to truly hear his wife when she expressed deeply felt concerns about their relationship. He explained that he often felt defensive and vulnerable at the start of these talks with her first few statements of fact. Even though he new in his heart of hearts that what she was expressing was true, and he knew he wanted to witness fully what she was expressing as a way of validating her, his desire to defend himself overwhelmed his sense of give her the space to express herself. He went on to say he wish he wouldn’t do that, it gave her the impression that he was not on the same page, that they were different types of people. I asked him what about defending himself was that urgent that it could not wait for her to finish, knowing very well that I was guilty of that same misdeed with my dear one often. He gave a very simple and honest answer. He said “look at my life, I lack self control.”


This got me thinking about many aspects of our lives and the roll self-control plays. I thought about people with life long habits and patterns such as those with who succeed in school, those who achieve the highest levels of their lives pursuits, those with good solid families, friends and those with seemingly are organized in how they live their lives. What I came up with was that they all shared an ability to control their impulses at a level that smoothed out their inner process. It seemed that those that achieved success in areas of their lives had developed inner habits that helped them calm the inner urges to leap at a preserved situation that caused insecurity and often could disrupt a more appropriate inner process that served them well in the long run.


It also occurred to me that by our 30’s, most of us innately know the difference between what serves us well and what gets us into difficulty. Some of us struggle with our urges to hold back those impulses that sabotage our inner most held values and intentions towards others and we recognize this in small things we do. We often classify these things with terms and words like self-discipline, laziness, poor character, etc. I heard a speaker on interpersonal skills once say “if we keep doing what we are doing, we keep getting what we get”. This quote is something I have repeated many times to people in my life. I have not always been the best at taking that advise however.


How do we gain control of the self and do a better job of managing those predictable impulses? What is self-control anyway? Is it something we can learn with all other things being balanced? Are some of us destined to miss our fullest potential because we never learned self-control? That seems a high price to pay for life. Many of us do not consider self-control a prison of sorts we make for ourselves. Many of us think of our circumstances as the reason we do what we do. Perhaps they are all related, but as adults can we work on and improve our self control? Is it possible to isolate and improve the habits we evolved when we were younger to dealing with uncomfortable situations? Are some of us destined to put our heads in the sand when life’s heart felt situations call for having self-control?


I will like to offer a notion for thought in this modern world. We can learn self-control no matter what age, we have to come to a place of recognition where we begin that learning from where we are. Like learning to meditate, we must begin with something small like our breathing, we must learn to think of ourselves as worthy of the good rewards we often forgo when we sabotage our needs and those of our loved once through poor self control. Our intentions towards others are indeed our intentions for ourselves. The reflection of ourselves we see in the responses of others to our actions can be extremely painful when its not congruent with our core. Finding a way to hear ourselves inside can be a less threatening inner practiced path to heal and learn how to have better self-control.


I share with those I have spoken to over the years that difficult with self control. I can admit to having lost some of the best relationships in my life because I could not control my emotional impulses to defend what I heard as painful reflections of myself vastly different in my instant mind from what my core intentions were. I discovered along the way after a few lost relationships that I had never learned how to control my self. I discovered along the way that the root of many of my lives challenges were squarely placed in my self-control. Hearing this similar expression from others makes me realize the journey I am still on. We all struggle self-control and it is sad that we spend so little time improving this keep element to being happier people.

Watching An Ink Pen Run Dry

The last six weeks have found me writing profusely in long hand. Writing long hand is my preferred method and style. It has a romantic feel to it and is the closest I come as a writer to the experience a reader has with a page turner of a book. Long hand is also my prefered method of penning the many letters I will write to friends and loved one's alike over the path of the year instead of email. November and December are the times when I like to write letters to people, with the book ends of Thanksgiving and New Years holding up Christmas, there is much to reflect on and yet still much more to write about in journals, note books and the odd collection of ideas and topics to explore when i have time that gather atop tables and in draws all around the house and the studio.

Recently, however, I have been going through pens at an alarming rate. I seem to be running out of ink in my favorite pens and ink wells all at once. I have had to dip into my back stock of pens, pencils and ink I stockpiled from the closing of my office unlike at any other time in my professional life that I can recall. It got me thinking about the scarcity of ink in other times and in previous generations and what we can learn from it. How can we, in these times, the age of the internet and email, the computer and electronic documents, cell phones and text messages, Blackberry's and television, relate to how it must have impacted the lives of our fore bearers across the globe to have a scarcity of ink.

The purpose of all these mediums I mentioned, including pen and ink, is simple to communicate. It is to facilitate the exchange and transfer of ideas and content. In our times, the cell phone and the scarcity of minutes is probably what compares best for me to the scarcity our fore bearers must have experienced when they ran out of ink as a scarce and costly resource that was necessary to transact all aspects of life. I can imagine how the common professional, such as an Student, a young architect or an aspiring writer had to be resourceful to keep themselves in ink. I imagine, unless you were of some means, ink was a luxury many could do with out and thus it stifled the growth of ideas from odd corners of society. Where there vendors capable of securing for a paying customer sufficient quantities of ink to keep a manuscript going? What type of ingenious methods were people forced to innovate and invent to cultivate a good constant supply of ink?

Since I recently restructured my life and curtailed back my expenditures, my 5000 minute luxury cell phone plan has had to be paired down to a reasonable level that I can afford on my very limited income these days. It has maid for minute counting like never before. I watch every minute, I talk try to save my phone conversations for those off peak hours and weekends when I can communicate with the outside world at a reasonable cost. Instead, I prefer to write and communicate by mail where I can write quite a bit for the cost of a 42 cent first class stamp.

In thinking back to my life in Ghana in the 1970's (where I was born and raised until the age of 11), it was customary to send letters with people who were traveling overseas to post for you when they arrived at their foreign destination. The thought process was that the postal system elsewhere was far more dependable that the local Ghanaian postal system. I wrote back then with inexpensive pens and pencils. I recall writing letters to pen pals that took took weeks and even months to get to them. It was a struggle back then in the heat and humidity of the Acccra region climate, to keep the ink in the inexpensive ball point pens we purchased from the road side vendors around the City and at market. I recall receiving letters from friends posted two to three months earlier according to the originating postmark, with beatiful penmanship in ink that looked bleautiful and luxurious. Many of the street boys I played and ran around with (against my mothers wishes), could not read or write. Some did not even go to school. The concept of using an ink pen or pencil was a far fetched concept for many. I saw first hand the stifled ideas of many smart young boys. Destined to lives as laborers because of the scarcity of writing materials and especially ink.

Looking back a little further to the turn of the nineteenth century through the great depression and the second world war era when cell phones did not exist, writing in the west was deeply important to the life blood of the growing industrialization of the world. Typing was still a luxury and ink was the primary method of recording all types of information. I am currently researching the life of a prominent citizen and business in the Tacoma area. In reviewing some of his business records, it is clear how important ink was to his operations. His records show significant orders of ink being placed above many other consumables. I read somewhere that inflation overtime can be pegged to the cost of a mans suit ensemble over time. I wonder if the same assessment can be made for ink?

I recently had to switch pens in mid letter to my partner Jill. I proudly informed her in the letter, after switching over to a new ink pen that I was one of the few people I knew, who new from actual use how many words you can actually get from the average modern pen. Whether its 6,000 or 20,000 words or some other number depending on your preferred brand, whether you are a heavy writer or a lighter scribe, it is humbling to me consider how we take ink and pen for granted as we do in this time.

I can't imagine what would happen to all my ideas and yours if we could not write them down. I think of the impact that ink has had on the passing of knowledge from the past on to us today. I think of the lost knowledge and the lost concepts and ideas, that hove been lost because of convenient access to ink. Whether made of mineral pigments or of plant extracts, I can very easily imagine an absent minded scholar of a different era, locked away for weeks and days, penning way at a manuscript in his studio, a seminal work that would lead humankind to a formula that could be the missing link of understanding some plague, he has a "eureka" moment, envisions the formula for an instant, goes to dip his quill in the ink well to record it, and discovers...it is empty.