I’ve spent a fair amount of the last year learning about and acting on issues of internal alignment – bringing satisfaction of values to all of my parts. In my life I’ve often been quite imbalanced, satisfying the parts that want ‘play’ and ‘escapism’ over all others. The part that wants to learn ended up being drowned out by the part that wants not to be confronted with not being so brilliant I understand everything instantly. The part that wants to save the world was overrun by the part that doesn’t want to be embarrassed, and the former didn’t have anything like enough expectancy to fight back with.
In short, I was a mess… but then, if you’ve been reading the autobiographical posts, you knew that.
I still haven’t sorted everything out, and gotten all of my parts on board, but we’re getting there, bit by bit.
One piece of making this happen has been paying better attention internally, and not trying to just force the outcomes “I” want. It turns out driving yourself that way works out badly over long timescales. I trace a lot of my personal akrasia to being at war inside myself, and I really enjoy the outcome of the massive boost in productivity I’ve gotten from not being at war.
This does, however, mean that sometimes I have to do stuff that’s less productive, on a short time horizon. At the end of last week I started getting requests to take a week or two off. I considered it, and consulted with my partner, and the end result is that I’m taking some me time this week and next. I’ll be taking care of that which is necessary, and that which I find I want to do, but I’m not going to drive myself the way I have been. It’s likely that my book review this week will be delayed, and next week will have fewer than three posts, but I think you’ll forgive me this.
What about you, dear reader? What does your internal alignment look like? What have you learned about working together with yourself?