The View from my Bicycle [COLUMN]

clipped from www.nickvanderleek.com

What hinders me from staying disciplined?

Discipline is required in the world. What hinders you and me from being disciplined - in our thoughts, habits, the things we do and say. I would say, more than anything, it is a lack of awareness of the consequences of not doing something.
There are other reasons too, obviously - lack of focus, fear, doubt, distractions, negative past experiences, anger even. But more than anything I believe we fail to move ourselves because we fail to imagine the positive results of our disciplined response, or the negative consequences of a failure to respond.

I had tears running down my face last night - not a common occurrence. Don't laugh. I was watching Smallville, one of the last episodes of the complete series 7 DVD's. Clark Kent's girlfriend Lana Lang has been catatonic for weeks, his cousin missing, and then the same catatonia infects Chloe. Clark finally takes on Brainiac, and defeats him, which lifts the catatonia. When he reaches the hospital where Lana has been receiving treatment, she's gone, but she leaves a video for him. She says, "I couldn't do this in person because if I laid eyes on you I could never go through with this. I love you so much, but I am holding you back. The world needs you more than I do, so I have to let you go. You will never know how much I love you. Please don't try to find me."

If you know the Superman story, you know Lana is the the girl Clark loves before he finds Lois Lane. So it is a relationship doomed from the start. I think we sometimes need to imagine whether we are in a relationship like that. Where, no matter how much we invest, it isn't going to work out. This may be true of where we work, where we live, how we live collectively and so on.

Personally I found it very sad, because Clark doesn't want to be a hero. He doesn't want to save people anonymously and never form close relationships. He wants one relationship with the one person he loves. And she realises this isn't possible, despite him finally trusting her with his secret.

On another tangent, I burnt some chicken I was cooking, and within a few minutes, my windows were infested with flies. They must smell the smoke or something. Within a few minutes there were literally hundreds of flies bouncing off the windows. When I opened the window, instead of the flies evacuating, more came in!
So I drove to the local convenience store and bought insect repellent. That got rid of them, but who would expect such a massive response? It made me feel incredibly grateful that we even have such a thing as insect repellent...