“All
pleasures have this way:
those
who enjoy them they drive on with stings.
Pleasure,
like the winged bee,
scatters
its honey sweet, then flies away,
and
with a clinging sting it strikes the hearts it touches.”
—from
Book 3, Poem 7
I can
appreciate the image here, first the sweetness and then the sting. The
sweetness is the promise of being gratified, and the sting is then being
consumed by the longing.
People
will often roll their eyes and snicker when they hear about self-control and
moderation regarding pleasures, but they do so thinking that others wish to
deny them any enjoyment. What they fail to see is that there is no enjoyment at
all when we throw away a mastery over our own choices, and when we allow
ourselves to be enslaved by the objects of our desires. Again, pleasures aren’t
the problem, but being ruled by them most certainly is.
I have
slowly come to understand this in principle, and I have seen it all to vividly
in practice. Years of working with addicts, with the dispossessed, and with the
abandoned has shown me that people will face all sorts of hardships, obstacles,
and inner demons, but the ones that will do the most harm, time and time again,
are those that follow from surrendering to gratification.
If
everything else is going wrong, we might think, at least this will make us feel
right, if only for a moment. It may appear like a blessed relief. By the time
we see how thoroughly we have sold our dignity, it may well seem like it is too
late to turn back.
The cold
and heartless may claim that this is only a problem for the weak, the lazy, or
the outcasts. Yet I have found that this curse crosses all lines of class,
color, and creed, and it spares no one who allows it to take control of his
life. People may have different poisons, but they are poisons nonetheless,
whether in a boardroom or a back alley, uptown or downtown.
What all
cases will share in common is trying to fill an emptiness on the inside by
seeking to consume things on the outside. In the process, we become willing to
sell ourselves out, and then to sell others out, just for the sake of some sort
of fix. It could be alcohol, or drugs, or sex, or food, or shopping, or any
sort of amusement or diversion, and in every case what we think we possess has
ultimately come to possess us.
Yes, I
have recognized it as a disease, perhaps of the most dangerous sort, because we
infect ourselves with our own thinking, and we find it all too easy to insist
that we aren’t sick at all. It hardly helps that when others give up on us, we
also give up on ourselves.
A big
part of a solution is in rethinking priorities, learning that not everything
pleasing is good, but that all things that are good should be pleasing. The
difference is between lust, bound to receiving, and love, ordered to giving; it
is in rediscovering that our lives are measured not
by the gratification of what is done to us, but by the merit of what we do.
Written in 9/2015
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