After a couple of bike rides and aimless computer sessions I’ve been reminded about internal vs external locus of control. Internal is where you believe you control your circumstances, and external is the opposite.
While one thinks they’ve an internal locus of control, external can creep up on you. Sometimes a deep melancholy strikes me on bike rides. Maybe it’s because there’s not enough variation, or the streets feel empty which become an extension of my internal state.
What I’m trying to get at is the world can be so rife with events and happenstance, but that slowly erodes your self-position. Namely, you become accustomed to things happening around you, to you, rather than you making things happen, you enacting.
You would think it doesn’t matter all that much. That life’ll happen either way. Yet every time I find myself slipping into an external locus, I usually have a bout of melancholy. Because it then becomes all too easy to criticize the paperclip town I live in with its car ingested arteries which dictate the flow of commerce and social niceties. I’m no stranger to that at all. Why isn’t there a square people walk around in? When is the next event, where can I say hello, why am I not engaged?
So I found these symptoms and now whisper to myself, you have all you need to find the world interesting.
Any time something is placed externally, such as an interesting event, or happiness, excitement, whatever really is top of mind, it always will appear out of reach. But when you place it within yourself, already attained, then it just requires some internal structuring through your natural processes of living. I am reminded of, “The kingdom of heaven is within you” and one of my favorite passages, as follows:
To put it simply, the hero of virtue and the duty ultimately lands himself in the same ambiguities as the hedonist and the utilitarian. Why? Because he aims at achieving .the good. as object. He engages in a self-conscious and deliberate campaign to “do his duty” in the belief that this is right and therefore productive of happiness. He sees “happiness” and “the good” as “something to be attained,” and thus he places them outside himself in the world of objects.
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The more one seeks “the good” outside oneself as something to be acquired, the more one is faced with the necessity of discussing, studying, understanding, analyzing the nature of the good. The more, therefore, one becomes involved in abstractions and in the confusion of divergent opinions.
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And as the end becomes more and more remote and more difficult, the means become more elaborate and complex, until finally the mere study of the means becomes so demanding that all one’s effort must be concentrated on this, and the end is forgotten.
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The way of Tao is to begin with the simple good with which one is endowed by the very fact of existence. Instead of self-conscious cultivation of this good (which vanishes when we look at it and becomes intangible when we try to grasp it), we grow quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life, and this way is analogous (at least psychologically) to the Christian “life of faith.” It is more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the fruit of one’s efforts.
It’s strange, discussions of faith always include an all-or-none mentality, and it’s often about things that rest outside of yourself. What’s wrong with having a little faith in yourself?
Maybe the generative source of care isn’t cold facts you collect, but rather a faith that congeals them all into a warm centerpiece.