Boethius, The Consolation 3.19

“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