I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
I largely completed my developmental read-through of my book manuscript last week, and I’m now embarking on what might constitute a redraft versus a rewrite. I am keeping the structure largely the same but I want to do a better job of writing each chapter in my own voice, with expanded memoir sections and philosophical ideas more digested and woven through out.
I’m going to start redrafting not from the beginning, but starting with a chapter in the middle, a new one, on Truth over Denial. This replaces a Suffering over Comfort chapter that felt, to me, like it was lacking in both rigor and energy.
As part of preparing to redraft that chapter, I’ve been studying the work of Iris Murdoch, including her ideas about imagination (facing and understanding the world and others as it is) versus fantasy (turning inwards and letting our stories of our selves frame how we understand the world).
In this blog post, I’m mostly free writing about reckfulness vs recklessness, spurred by my study of Murdoch’s ideas.
The basic idea of my book is that we approach our romantic lives reckfully, seeking the optimal outcome in a consumerist society, where each of us are expected to always be striving to have more money, be more productive, achieve peak healthfulness (despite our ongoing aging and deterioration), buy and have the best things and experiences, while looking amazing doing all that.
In the reckful life, one’s ego is the most important subject; other subjects are reduced to mirrors or measures or ways of enhancing the ego. This is what Murdoch calls fantasy.
What would approaching life recklessly look like? Putting down the need to constantly improve, to control outcomes, to be the best and have the best? Setting down what Murdoch calls our fat, relentless egos so that we can instead get in touch with what is outside ourselves, including other people?
It would look like setting down the idea that everything we do and have and are must be constantly improving. Maybe the house doesn’t need to be renovated,1 maybe we don’t need to workout more than we already are (or maybe not at all), maybe it’s ok if we drink too much or smoke pot on a daily basis or eat pizza twice a week, maybe a weed-filled lawn rather than Kentucky bluegrass is evidence of a human being concerned with what really matters.
Living recklessly would look like letting go of control of outcomes and making predictions of what’s going to happen in the world. For me, maybe it would be acknowledging, finally, after fifty-seven years on this earth, that I have no idea where my life will be in five years, or even if I will still be around.
It would look like feeling trust in the unfolding and trust in myself to deal with that unfolding no matter what happens. I can handle anything even if I were taken prisoner and tortured, or faced a painful terminal illness, or lost a child, or any other possibility. There is nothing that can happen that I cannot endure.
Approaching my life with recklessness would look like celebrating all the good things that have miraculously arrived in my life, not just due to my choices, but due to the vagaries of fate and happenstance: my beloved beautiful children, my delightful pets, my emotionally attuned boyfriend, my still-active and optimistic parents, my brilliant sisters and their wonderful children, my close friends with their wisdom and insight. It’s not surprising to me that when I constructed that list it was all about the relationships in my life, the people and other beings in my life. But I also have been lucky in other ways. I’m healthy and cognitively with-it; I live in affluence and abundance and comfort. I spend my days thinking and writing and (not really recently) painting.
And further it would look like celebrating or maybe just affirming and acknowledging all the bad things that have happened. The grief I’ve suffered — the pain I’ve inflicted on others — this is what human existence is made of. It is not escapable. You can commit suicide as one escape but you would thereby leave suffering in your absence. Just because you couldn’t experience it yourself doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist as an effect of your choice. There is a moral dimension to choosing life; it’s not just a personal decision to do so — it’s relational and moral. It affirms the possibilities in the world and my place in it in a web of caring and relating.
When I came up with the idea of Truth over Denial (or–let me confess–when ChatGPT did) I wondered to myself, is this really reckless versus reckful? Relatedly, I have been thinking about how to make sure that when people read my book they (1) understand what I mean by reckfulness and (2) come to associate recklessness with a setting down of egoistic concerns.
I see recklessness as deriving from the existentialist perspective, one which Murdoch folded into her own philosophy. Existentialists value risk, openness, and becoming. That’s what I mean by being reckless instead of reckful. Reckfulness calls for carefulness, submission to cultural demands (Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom will be useful here), and a consumerist optimization mindset.
But like Murdoch, I don’t want to stop simply with the freedom of choice and agency that Sartre and some other existentialist emphasize. I want to move towards the need for ethical choices, for reducing the overpowering demands of the self, for constructing one’s life in dialogue with what matters.
- I’m not against home renovations; I’m against the need to improve your home constantly. ↩︎