Wishful Thinking, Meaning Well, and Failing

So much that I attempt to write about gets left in draft, incomplete. I am publishing the following self-absorbed drivel because maybe it will provide a public service to others who find themselves similarly afflicted. I am open to suggestions as to how to prevail upon myself to achieve what I'd like, but it ultimately comes down to me doing the hard labor that I so often seek to avoid.

Og reminded me today that he had tried to get me to think more deeply of what he calls the Left and Right forces in play in our lives. I really don't recall exactly what his hypothesis was because as he was explaining it I went on one of my tangential side-trips inspired by his new way of viewing things. He saw it better than I do because I was of no help to him when he needed a sounding-board and multi-processor feedback back then.

It reminded me that I see the forces at play in our lives in a way nobody else I know seems to share. It should be no surprise to regular readers here that it is my opinion that anti-human forces (in humans themselves) play an immense role in how badly the plans and inventions of the brightest minds get turned to deadly outcomes.

And that further got me to reflect again about why I chose my online name that implies that this is the place to find the fervor that was Blaise Pascal's.

Did I already see the concept of God and love of life much as apparently did Blaise Pascal? Or did I only begin to comprehend those conceptions more deeply after I focused on how he showed hubris filled men and their nefarious plans could be defeated? I do not remember.

But what I did do, in adding the name Fervor, was seek to attain the level of his fervor, a sort of wishful thinking: a setting of a goal.

It is a sad self-recognition of my shortcomings that I have come in no way close to the level of that man's drive. My silence in the last month has troubled me. I far too often take solace in the thought: "if you have nothing worth putting in the effort to say properly – fully – better to say nothing." But as any good writer will tell me, it's in the discipline to write that gets you where you want to go.

Yet I have mixed results over the years in trying to follow that advice. Just this last month alone I started many commentaries on important subjects. Yet I did not find and draw upon what drive I needed to complete them. I failed to overcome either what I view as my laziness (being hard on myself) or my scattered-thoughts/forgetfulness (being charitable to myself), and maybe a good bit of oh-what's-the-use-ism.

When I see so much awful behavior transpiring in the world, micro and macro, I get angered by the lack of reflective, conscientious commentary about society's failings being at the root of so much of it. And I find that that anger passes far too quickly to keep me fired-up to write. Maybe that is precisely how I and a good number of my generation were conditioned by the Conditioners. But I KNOW they wanted me to behave that way, so it's really my own shortcomings now that I am aware of that indoctrination.  Oh God how I wish I could find, in the shorter time remaining to me, the key to becoming a better man than I have been.