A friend pointed out to me that I always have an objective. I’m always trying to accomplish something, reach a goal, or at least form one.
The idea of surrender and “letting go” is ubiquitous in self-help and religious literature. Unfortunately for someone like me, it’s easy to turn “letting go” into an aim or objective, yet another form to cling to.
I used to tie myself in knots around the paradox of seeking to be selfless for selfish reasons. This appears in a lot of popular Zen material as the problem of desiring to be without desire or the ego that seeks to be free from itself.
As a melancholic, I’m frustratingly, grindingly slow to learn lessons. In particular I struggle to generalise implicitly. I’m okay with “all X are Y”, but it takes many iterations of X before I realise “hey, it’s X!”
It’s been X all along, but like a person with amnesia, this new memory will not last for long. Even if I remember the conclusion, I’ll forget its true significance. I’ll remember what but not how. And before I know it, I’ll be back striving for some ill-defined goal.
Ultimately, goal-seeking is about feeling in control, and with that realisation I’m immediately tempted to dig at the roots of this love of control and see if I can’t put an end to it. But that would be another objective, and I’d disappear once again down the rabbit-hole.
So, appropriately, this post has no conclusion, no recommendation, no suggestion of how to solve the problem and, perhaps, no temptation to form another goal.
zacalstin 
Whoa, I can so relate to these paradoxes. I always have a goal, it brings me alive, yet I understand the importance of letting go. And that selfless paradox can get me in so much anguish.
Thanks JD. It might be something that goes with the melancholic temperament. We have difficulty “letting go”, and our goals – usually in the form of ideals – help us to make sense of the world and act in it. I’d like to say “I’m working on it”, but maybe it’s better if I don’t work on it? Confusing.