Persistence

I was thinking about Oliver Burkeman in the shower yesterday. Not like that. Having battled my way through the January gym with all its attendant new year's resolutes, I was feeling good about myself. This wasn't anything to do with managing to get to the gym, I always manage that, largely because I know I will stand in the shower at the end and feel good. I attribute this feeling at least partly to chemistry and the endorphins that exercise floods your body with, but part of it is also a sense of certainty.
In one of his brilliant 'This Column Will Change Your Life' columns a while back Oliver Burkeman addressed the problem that people who are broadly to the left of the political spectrum tend to be less happy than those on the right. This is apparently down to certainty. If you are a bit of a lefty wooly liberal type, you tend to question the rectitude of everything you do and worry about its impact on others (cf the rest of this blog), whereas if you're a right wing chin you're certain of the rectitude of all your actions and unconcerned whether they affect other people. The result is that being heartless and uncaring makes you happier, because in order to do so, you need to be certain that you are right/justified in your actions. Obviously, I would look at it that way; perhaps if I was more right wing, I'd say that if you're a feeble whingeing loser, you are bound to be miserable and deservedly so. Either way you want to cut it, this observation brings up some interesting questions about temperament and ideology, and illustrates one of the many problems with the left as a whole: that in order to compete as a political force, it has a disproportionate amount of navel-gazing to work through as a matter of course.
On a personal level this navel-gazing also needs to be overcome to avoid crippling stagnation and/or the depression that is apparently the curse of lefty liberals everywhere. According to Burkeman (who was summarising someone else - yes this is tertiary) the key is in planning ahead, having fixed goals and definite plans. If we fix our plans, we reduce the opportunity for change and uncertainty, and therefore also doubt apparently.
At this time of year we quite often think about making changes in our lives and I find this sort of thing to generate a large amount of uncertainty, as we may have ambition to change, but whether we manage to is reliant on so many factors that it is hard to imagine a person who has sufficient blind self-confidence not to be affected by the uncertainty. In such a climate, it is nice to find anything that will introduce a little certainty. Hence why I like the gym: it is based on a simple transaction with definite outcomes.
I suppose the danger is that I comfort myself with these minor certainties to a sufficient extent to avoid facing up to the major uncertainties that I need to face in order to move my life forward. Although it is odd to think about what I mean by 'move my life forward', what does 'forward' refer to? It surely cannot mean forward in time, as everyone's life moves that way without prompting. It has some sort of goal oriented meaning requiring a specific goal: wealth, career progression, social movement; any kind of achievement of accumulation. I'm human, so sure I want to accumulate stuff, I'm just not sure what it is exactly or whether I can justify it... Oh hang on, here I go again. Clearly I need to go away and come up with a plan.
See you next year.