paradoxum

"The soul cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

 This is not MY answer...it is Pascal's (Pensees #136 i believe). As I thought about my answer, I came up with the word "separation". I felt that separation or being alone was the deepest cause of our unhappiness but as soon as I read Pascal's answer, I was intrigued and it struck a chord.

What does Pascal mean?

I wonder if you don't already know. Can you stay quietly in your room?

I don't mean going to your room and "vegging" out in front of the TV or falling asleep or texting or facebooking. I mean, go to your room alone and be totally present with yourself. Perhaps you should stop now...and go be alone...totally alone...present to yourself alone, for one hour.

Peter Kreeft describes his attempt to "stay quietly in his room" this way:

"Am I really incapable of the simple deed of staying quietly in my own room?  Could I endure my own company alone for one hour, or am I so bored with myself that I have to invent some trouble to divert myself? I resolved to refute Pascal's implied insult - and failed flat. I went into the smallest and darkest room in my house and turned off the lights. To drown out distracting noise, I turned on an electric fan to make 'white noise'. I set an alarm clock outside the room for one hour. I then prepared myself to have a good, instructive, happy time meeting myself.

After ten minutes I checked the alarm and was surprised that the hour had not yet passed.  After another ten minutes, I woke up to find myself asleep. I deliberately didn't think about anything outside the room. I didn't bring in other people or my relationships with them or my work or my plans for the future or my past. For all these things were not really there in that room with me then. Only I was. I thought I should be able to endure my own presence without running away from myself into something external, even relationships, good and important as these are; for I wanted to encounter who it was who had all these relationships. If I can't meet him, if everything I do is a diversion from the doer, I'm in big trouble...I think I'm in big trouble."

I agree w/ Kreeft. I'm in big trouble. The one person whose presence I cannot stand is my own. Perhaps this is a sign that, given the chance, I could not stand God's presence either. I was recently asked why I so often reach the "top" of the mountain, and then find a way to "screw" it up. My only answer: I'm bored. When one reaches the top of the mountain, the question is always, "what's next?" I am never satisfied. Ever.

Pascal goes on to say that what we as humans want is "the hunt, not the capture." We want diversion. We want to be diverted from thinking about ourselves and our condition. "We seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces....A given man lives a life free from boredom by gambling a small sum every day. Give him every morning the money he might win that day, but on one condition that he does not gamble, and you will make him unhappy. He must have excitement, he must delude himself into imagining that he would be happy to win what he would not want as a gift if it meant giving up gambling. Without diversion there is no joy; with diversion there is no sadness."

Look at us: we are a distracted culture. We are distracted by work, sports, movies, video games, church, iPods, iPhones, computers, politics, internet, Facebook, Twitter and a million and one other things. The one thing we are not is present to ourselves or anyone else for that matter. The level of distraction is at an all time high and it shows no sign of receding. We will distract ourselves, literally, to death. Why are we so distracted? Why do we love diversion? Why are we so bored?

In the 1970's my father wrote a small book entitled, "The Boredom Cycle". I don't have a copy. I think I'll have him send me one. I expect it is the truest book he ever wrote. It seems the mantra of the teen culture is: "I'm bored". How can anyone be bored today? And yet I hear it now, and not just from teenagers. Affairs arise from boredom. Wars arise from boredom. And alas, Politics and Religion arise from boredom! All of these things work to keep us from facing ourselves. We seek one new adventure (spiritual or material) after another in a never ending quest to find "it"...to arrive...to progress towards "it"...and...the cycle never ends, or so we think. It does end. We all die. It is this one inevitable end that fuels our distractions.

What will make us happy?

Kreeft comments on Pascal: "If only I work hard enough to retire with a yacht, I'll be happy; If only I get another wife, I'll be happy; If only I win this tournament, I'll be happy; and so on. It is the world's most universally failed experiment - and the world's most universally repeated one. It is stupid, self-deluding, wasteful and self-destructive. And we all do it. We all think it. We are happy only climbing the mountain, not staying peacefully on the summit; only chasing the fox, not catching it; only courting,. not marrying; only traveling, not arriving; only fighting wars, not keeping a boring peace. We can't imagine a heaven that is not boring; we can only believe in it."

And so, in the end, we find ourselves "never living, but hoping to live." The soul cause of our unhappiness is found in that empty room...and perhaps the soul source of any true happiness is in that room as well.

I write all this as I chat an old friend on Facebook, check my email, and see that my phone has 6 new messages, most of them from Twitter. Gotta run.